Workshop: Cloud-Native Observability with OpenTelemetry

Modern systems architecture often splits functionality into microservices for adaptability and velocity. The challenge of managing infrastructure for microservices has led to the cloud native ecosystem, including Kubernetes, Envoy, gRPC, and other projects. Observability, including application performance management (APM), is an essential component of a cloud-native stack. Without observability, application developers and operators cannot understand the behavior of their applications and ensure the reliability of those applications.

OpenTelemetry (the successor to OpenCensus and OpenTracing) is a standardized library and specification that collects distributed traces, metrics, and logs from instrumented services. By instrumenting once with OpenTelemetry, developers and operators can understand how data and events flow through their applications through a variety of different visualization backends.

In this workshop, you'll learn how to instrument a distributed set of microservices for traceability using OpenTelemetry, and how to analyze your service's traces using open source software backends like Jaeger/Zipkin. Finally, you'll be able to leverage OpenTelemetry vendor-neutral flexibility to try out various other tracing backends, without recompiling. And you can go home feeling comfortable with implementing OpenTelemetry in your own applications, and being prepared to choose how you will store and visualize traces.

Tech requirement: Laptop with wifi is sufficient, we use Gitpod to provide IDEs for the workshop.