front matter
We truly live in exciting times! The rise of cloud-native technologies, starting some 10 years ago with Docker and Kubernetes, and the availability of cloud offerings that enable you to run large-scale applications based on a microservices architecture have changed the way we write and operate software.
I had the luck and pleasure of being part of that journey, starting in the container space in 2015 and then working in the Kubernetes space until 2021. There was one aspect of cloud native that stood out to me: given the dynamics of containers and function-as-a-service, if you don’t have insights into what’s going on in your system and aren’t able to ask ad hoc questions about the state and trends, you’re effectively driving a car blindfolded. When I changed teams in AWS to focus on observability, OpenTelemetry had just been formed, and the space was quickly developing. Now, at the time of publication, it’s fair to say that observability has gone mainstream.