Cloud Native London, January 2024

Hi folks!

Welcome to our January Cloud Native London meetup, our first of 2024! Join us to hear from our three great speakers and network with your fellow techies over pizza and drinks, or alternatively chat and following along on Youtube!

6:00 Pizza and drinks
6:30 Welcome
6:45 Quickwit: Cloud-Native Logging and Distributed Tracing (Francois Massot, Quickwit)
7:15 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Native Observability (Eric D. Schabell, Chronosphere)
7:45 Break
8:00 Transcending microservices hell for Supergraph Nirvana (Tom Harding, Hasura)
8:30 Wrap up

See you there!
Cheryl (@oicheryl)

Quickwit: Cloud-Native Logging and Distributed Tracing (Francois Massot, Quickwit)
In the post-Elasticsearch era, new storage backends for observability data, such as Loki, Tempo, or OpenObserve, have emerged, abandoning the “good old” inverted index stored on local disks to increase cost efficiency and rely massively on object storage. But indexing doesn’t have to suck. Quickwit is a new search engine for logs and distributed tracing that takes fewer resources than traditional search engines and works directly on object storage with subsecond latency, unlocking powerful search and analytics capabilities. After introducing Quickwit’s architecture, this session will offer a practical on sending distributed traces to Quickwit using the OpenTelemetry API. I will then analyze traces using Grafana and derive metrics commonly used for application monitoring in a Grafana dashboard.

Cofounder and core engineer on Quickwit engine, find me @FrancoisMassot on Twitter.

Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Native Observability (Eric D. Schabell, Chronosphere)
Are you looking at your organizations efforts to enter or expand into the cloud native landscape and feeling a bit daunted by the vast expanse of information surrounding cloud native observability? When you're are moving so fast with agile practices across your DevOps, SRE's, and platform engineering teams, it's no wonder this can seem a bit confusing. Unfortunately, the choices being made great impact on both your business, your budgets, and the ultimate success of your cloud native initiatives that hasty decision up front lead to big headaches very quickly down the road. In this talk, I'll introduce the problem facing everyone with cloud native observability followed by 3 common mistakes that I'm seeing organizations make and how you can avoid them!

Eric is Chronosphere's Director Evangelism. He's renowned in the development community as a speaker, lecturer, author and baseball expert. His current role allows him to help the world understand the challenges they are facing with cloud native observability. He brings a unique perspective to the stage with a professional life dedicated to sharing his deep expertise of open source technologies, organizations, and is a CNCF Ambassador. Follow on https://www.schabell.org. (@ericschabell)

Transcending microservices hell for Supergraph Nirvana (Tom Harding, Hasura)
If you've worked in technology for longer than a couple of years, you'll have taken a ride on the architectural see-saw. After throwing out your monoliths with the proverbial bathwater and going all in on microservices, you decide that actually the microservices suck too and you're going back to the monolith. Every few years the trends seem to change with organizations switching architecture patterns when existing technology solutions don't quite fix what are often the business-derived problems of data ownership, access management, privacy, storage, and mapping. In this talk, I'll provide insight into backends for databases, and why many organizations are starting to create their own graphql-based data supergraph.

Tom is an engineer at Hasura focused on producing compilers from GraphQL to SQL, NoSQL, and beyond. He is a regular speaker on topics such as graphics, constraint solving, and functional programming, and an active mentor to many programming newcomers. He now lives in Barcelona with his partner and their cat, Beef, and he spends a lot of time making a fool of himself in both Spanish and Catalan. Twitter: https://twitter.com/am_i_tom

Check out https://www.oicheryl.com/cloudnativelondon if you're interested in speaking or sponsoring.