So, gather up your jackets, move it to the exits
I hope you have found a friend
Closing time, every new beginning
Comes from some other beginning’s end
Last Friday brought about the close of another KubeCon. And in other news last week, we had snow!
Though it was less startling than the snow in KubeCon Austin in 2017, it seemed like a reminder from KubeCon’s past to not forget from whence we came – and to take stock of what’s changed, what’s changing, and where this all is going.
Shifting Sands of Observability
Putting aside the array of exciting new AI solutions, what’s on the verge of making the next leap? OpenTelemetry is showing similar signs of momentum, adoption, and maturation that we saw from Kubernetes back in 2017. Existing legacy vendors are touting “OpenTelemetry Native” Observability solutions. Every customer I spoke to at the conference was somewhere on the OTel curve – some very early and many already in major adoption and rollout mode, but the vast majority are somewhere in-between. The OpenTelemetry contributor list provides a glimpse into the adoption and momentum as it grows.
The OpenTelemetry Collector has democratized instrumentation, OpAMP (Open Agent Management Protocol) will standardize management and control, and Perses is opening up dashboards and visualization. Vendors are broadly supporting it all, customers are leaning into it, and who knows what happens next when all these pieces come together? Given the painful observability cost and efficiency issues that many platform engineering teams are trying to address today, the observability market seems ripe for disruption.
It’s Time for the Observability Control Plane
Mixing in a healthy dose of controllability into the current state of observability is a next logical step if we want to move the industry forward. That was our theme at the ControlTheory booth at KubeCon, and it fit into the overall OTel vibe of the show. The concept of an Observability Control Plane perfectly addresses the pains of the market today and more importantly is a missing piece of the OTel puzzle as we move the entire architecture forward.
An Observability Control Plane sits between your observability instrumentation (the data plane) and your visualization, dashboard solution to analyze, optimize, and amplify telemetry with intelligent policies, rules, and feedback loops. It works with your existing visualization or dashboard tools and leverages both existing legacy instrumentation and of course OTel agents and collectors. It’s more than just a “data pipeline” but a fully intelligent control plane for fleet management and policy-based enrichment, filtering, and governance to control spiraling costs but also to deliver better insights and drive agility into your existing telemetry.
Every New Beginning..
Like the Semisonic song reminds us, “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” Thus, the “new beginnings” of our AI future launches off the last decade plus of cloud computing which itself was built off many decades of tech advancements and investment before that. OpenTelemetry is following the same path. A path that was blazed by the success of Kubernetes. A new beginning that builds off the foundations laid by observability advancements over the last decade. And thus a new OpenTelemetry beginning leading us to what’s next – a more open, intelligent, and controlled future.
