January Meetup: Observability, Kubernetes, and the Beginner’s Journey

Let’s kick off 2025 with another great evening of cloud-native learning, real-world talks, and hallway conversations with Portland’s platform-engineering community.

Date: Thursday, January 22
Time: 5:30–7:30 PM
Location: Reperio Health, 4784 SE 17th Ave Suite 120, Portland, OR
Recording: Talks are typically recorded (opt-in by speakers)

The Observability Reset: 4 Foundational Principles for O11y That Scales by Noam Levy, CTO at groundcover

Let’s face it, collecting metrics, logs, and traces isn’t enough anymore. Most o11y stacks today are drowning in telemetry, buried in cost overruns, and spread so thin across tools that they’ve become more noise than signal. The classic SaaS-based model is cracking.

This talk lays out 4 foundational principles for building a sustainable observability posture - that scale with infra and budget:

• Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC): SaaS o11y is financially unsustainable at scale.
• Consolidate or Bust: DevEx suffers when visibility is fragmented- consolidation isn’t a luxury - it’s a requirement.
• Standardize Everything: Open protocols, pluggable pipelines, and vendor-neutral APIs are the only way forward, or your o11y is a ticking liability.
• Self-Reliance: You can’t rely on app-level instrumentation forever - eBPF enables scalable o11y without complexity

This session pulls from real-world deployments and lessons learned helping engineering teams scale visibility without compromise.

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“What It’s Like to Learn Cloud-Native Today — A Beginner’s Kubernetes Story” by Kelis Hightower

When given the chance to explore cloud-native development, I chose not to avoid the unfamiliar. With no prior Kubernetes experience and only a few weeks to learn, I took a hands-on approach by building a small burnout-aware study tool to ground abstract concepts in something tangible.

This talk shares what it’s like to learn cloud-native technologies today from a beginner’s perspective. Through experimentation with containers, Kubernetes, and cloud services, I’ll reflect on the mental model shifts, early misconceptions, and “aha” moments that emerged from
learning by building. Rather than focusing on expertise, this would offer an honest look at what beginners actually take away from a short, modern introduction to cloud-native systems.

## Agenda

5:30–6:00 — Check-in, snacks, networking
6:00–6:30 — The Observability Reset (Noam Levy)
6:30–7:00 — Beginner’s Kubernetes Story (Kelis Hightower)
7:00–7:30 — Networking (and games if anyone wants to bring some!)

## Who Should Attend

Platform engineers, SREs, DevOps, app/platform teams, OSS maintainers, beginners learning cloud-native, and anyone curious about observability, Kubernetes, modern infra, or developer experience.

## Sponsors

Venue Sponsor — Reperio Health
F&B Sponsor — groundcover

## Getting Here

Parking: There is parking to the right of the building if you are facing the entrance. You will see a gated chain-fence parking area with a small sign that says “visitor parking.” Please park there.

Biking: There is a bike rack inside the old “Vault” inside the lobby right next to Ruse. Once you walk through the double doors, you will see the bike vault to your left.

Once you arrive, you will see Ruse in front of the building and the double doors next to it. There will be signage out, so you will easily see where to go once you get here.