Grafana & Friends -- Together with SRE Munich

We're co-hosting with https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/sremuc/ this time. Come and see new faces!

Talk 1) Philosophy of Observabiltiy
Richard Hartmann, Director of Community, Grafana Labs
Bio: Richard "RichiH" Hartmann is the Director of Community at Grafana Labs, a member of the Office of the CTO of Grafana Labs, Prometheus team member, OpenMetrics founder, OpenTelemetry member, CNCF Technical Oversight Committee member, CNCF Governing Board member, and more. He also leads, organizes, or helps run various conferences from hundreds to 18,000 attendess, including KubeCon, PromCon, FOSDEM, DENOG, DebConf, and Chaos Communication Congress. In the past, he made mainframe databases work, ISP backbones run, kept the largest IRC network on Earth running, and designed and built a datacenter from scratch. Go through his talks, podcasts, interviews, and articles at https://github.com/RichiH/talks or follow him on Mastodon at https://chaos.social/@RichiH for musings on the intersection of technology and society.

Talk 2) Navigating Observability with OTel and Grafana: A Strategic Overview
Nadya Shakhat, Cloud Architect, Nordcloud
Abstract: In this presentation we are going to dive into the interplay between OpenTelemetry (OTel) and Grafana within the AWS landscape. We'll focus on the challenges and solutions for scaling OTel collectors and Grafana agents, with a special emphasis on the challenges of tracing sampling. This talk is tailored to shed light on creating a scalable, robust observability framework in cloud-native environments, and will also touch on the different deployment scenarios, balancing technical depth with practical insights..
Bio: Nadya Shakhat, a Cloud Architect at Nordcloud and a certified GCP Professional Architect and Data Engineer, brings a decade of experience in software development, DevOps and observability. Her journey includes significant contributions to open-source projects like OpenStack, particularly as a core contributor to the OpenStack Telemetry project. At Nordcloud and IBM, Nadya focuses on crafting scalable data and observability solutions for diverse clientele, leveraging her deep expertise in monitoring and cloud technologies.

Talk 3) Navigating the Nuances of GitOps in an Enterprise Environment
Bernard Halas, Founder, Berops
Abstract: GitOps has emerged as a leading approach for infrastructure management, but its implementation can be challenging due to the diversity of tools, legacy systems, and organizational factors involved. This talk will delve into the common pitfalls and complexities of large-scale GitOps deployments, exploring strategies to streamline operations without compromising flexibility.
We'll address technical aspects, architectural considerations, security implications, work methodologies, organizational structures, and the role of Developer Experience (DevEx) in shaping a successful GitOps implementation.
Bio: Bernhard's professional career has been growing at an intersection of networking, SW engineering and infra-engineering fields. He used to run an ISP (Internet Service Provider) company as a hobby and that's where his love for the Linux ecosystem sparked. This has naturally evolved through DevOps-like roles into cloud platform engineering nowadays. He's leading a team of Kubernetes consultants with a focus on on-prem and hybrid-cloud platforms.