Member post by Tal Yitzhak, Solution Architect at Lightrun
Introduction
As we bid farewell to a remarkably productive year in 2023, the dedicated members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) community have tirelessly toiled to craft innovative solutions and curate community-driven content. These resources are designed to empower practitioners across all skill levels, offering invaluable insights to streamline their daily tasks.
In this article, we embark on a journey to revisit and highlight the cream of the crop—the top 9 resources, spanning blog posts, projects, webinars, and more—that the CNCF has generously shared with the global community. From my perspective, these resources stand out as exceptionally valuable, poised to elevate industry practices in 2024 and beyond.
While the forthcoming list captures some of the most noteworthy contributions, it’s essential to acknowledge that the CNCF website is a treasure trove, housing an abundance of additional resources and online projects. Consider this post a mere glimpse into the vast ocean of knowledge and innovation that the CNCF community has cultivated, underscoring the organization’s commitment to fostering growth and excellence within the ever-evolving landscape of cloud-native computing. Join us as we explore this curated selection, with the understanding that there is so much more waiting to be discovered on the CNCF’s expensive digital domain. 🙂
Top 4 Blogs
- This article captured my eyes since it is short and to the point. It explains in a very clear way the difference between the levels of observability with the analogy of Radar vs. Black Box https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/12/11/software-observability-from-the-lens-of-radar-and-a-black-box/
- The following article posted on CNCF blog site by Sonja Chevre is amazing. It lists 7 critical anti-patterns that developers and observability practitioners ought to know and keep in mind especially around API observability and debugging. Read the full piece here: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/09/27/bad-api-observability/
- Earlier in 2023, the CNCF featured this article originally posted on Datanami website. It covers how Fluentd has grown to be standard in log data aggregation and processing across different observability platforms (free and commercial). This is a great ready for any one within the observability practice. https://www.datanami.com/2023/01/18/fluentd-rides-wave-of-roll-your-own-observability/
- Another blog that was published in 2023 that is very important was around best practices in building a cost-efficient troubleshooting practice for K8S. Debugging apps especially in runtime across the K8S deployments is very complex for multiple reasons including gaining remote access from the developer environment as well as the available tooling in the remote deployment. In this article you can understand the power of dynamic logging and how they aid such challenges . Read the full article here:
Top 3 Recorded Webinars
- This webinar tackles observability practices in 5G networks. Led by Software Mind experts, the webinar walks through how to use observability solutions to analyze issues and data (Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana Loki, etc.) https://www.cncf.io/online-programs/cncf-on-demand-webinar-observability-in-5g-networks/
- In this webinar, CNCF are sharing how to use service mesh observability with Kuma open telemetry for cloud-native applications. Watch the webinar here: https://www.cncf.io/online-programs/cloud-native-live-streamline-service-mesh-observability-with-kuma-opentelemetry/
- The following webinar was featured also on the CNCF program and was around Observability and FinOps.The absence of cost visibility and standardized FinOps practices that transcend specific vendors can emerge as a significant business hurdle. Watch the full webinar and understand the opportunity for optimization of cloud costs: https://www.cncf.io/online-programs/cncf-on-demand-webinar-finops-observability-monitoring-kubernetes-cost-with-opencost/
Top 3 Observability Projects
- Cilium is an emerging open source project that together with eBPF can extend observability, performance analysis, and monitoring capabilities for the Telco space. Read more about the combined solutions here: https://thenewstack.io/cilium-cncf-graduation-could-mean-better-observability-security-with-ebpf/
- Argo is another popular and widely adopted project that’s embraced by the CNCF. Since December of 2022 this project has become a graduated project within the CNCF and it is aimed to simplify, streamline and enhance the execution of workflows, K8S cluster management and GitOps. Learn more in this dedicated project page: https://www.cncf.io/projects/argo/
- Jaeger is the CNCF project dedicated to distributed tracing functionality. https://www.cncf.io/projects/jaeger/
Button Line
Kudos to CNCF for their amazing work, contribution and community efforts that they continuously give us. As we wrap up 2023, and looking ahead at 2024, I believe that the future will now shift from this great baseline project and resources towards more developer observability centric solutions together with advanced GenAI capabilities to allow developers to take their observability skills and capabilities to the next level. Complementing standard APM tools and existing open-source telemetry projects together with next level observability can re-shape the entire observability landscape and support the shift-left trend that we have seen growing over the past years.