Open Source is the Engine for Observability at Scale – Observability at Scale TV EP 2

As today’s organizations seek advanced monitoring and observability to ensure the performance of their microservices and cloud native systems, issues of cost, complexity and tool sprawl have emerged as pervasive challenges. Join our hosts Alan Shimel and Mitch Ashley along with panelists Dotan Horovits (Logz) and Constance Caramanolis (Splunk) as they dive into the challenges that DevOps practitioners are frequently forced to compromise on and how they transform modern observability. The video and a transcript of the conversation are below. 

Alan Shimel: Hey everyone, welcome to Observability At Scale, one of the latest video series or video show series, over here on TechStrong TV part of TechStrong Group. I’m your host, Alan Shimel. And let me just say that Observability At Scale is sponsored by our good friends at Logz.io, it’s L-O-G-Z and many thanks to them for sponsoring this. This is a great subject.  

I recently in KubeCon about two weeks ago. And I will tell you, it was pretty much all Observability all the time. I did 40 interviews there in two days. And I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere between a third and 40% of the people I interviewed were about Observability. And many of those being at KubeCon CNCF Cloud Native Con, many of them were about open-source Observability. 

Whether we’re talking about Prometheus or OpenTelemetry or several of the other Observability-related open-source projects out there. That seems to be the subject of today’s episode: Observability and open source. And I think we’ve got a great panel to discuss this. Let me introduce you to them. First of all, we have Dotan Horovits. Dotan is with Logz. Actually Dotan, you introduce yourself. I don’t want to put words in your mouth. Go ahead.

Dotan Horovits: Gladly. Glad to be here, Alan. And my name is Dotan Horovits, and I’m a developer advocate at Logz.io. Logz is a cloud-native platform for observability. And the nice thing that I love about Logz.io is that it’s all based on popular open-source tools that we’re going to talk about extensively today like the ELK Stack and Prometheus and OpenTelemetry and Jaeger and so on. So that’s about Logz and myself.

Alan Shimel: Thank you, Dotan. Next up, we have Constance Caramanolis, and I hope I did that justice. Hey, Constance, how are you? Maybe a little bit about yourself for our audience?

Constance C.: Good morning. I’m good. Hi, everyone. I’m Constance. I’m a principal software engineer at Splunk. Right now I’m on OpenTelemetry Governance Committee for I guess another five days until elections are over. But I’ve been involved in open source for about four or five years now, both on Envoy OpenTelemetry and on the product with Con community.

Alan Shimel: Excellent. Thank you, Constance, for coming on today. We appreciate you having you here. And then last but not least, is my co-host of Observability At Scale. He’s also CTO here at TechStrong Group and a principal analyst at TechStrong Research. It’s Mitchell Ashley. Hey, Mitchell, how are you?

Mitchell Ashley: Good, good, good. Great to be here and very thankful to Dotan and Constance for joining us. I look forward to a great conversation.

Alan Shimel: Yep. Thank you. So guys, as I started the show off I was out in Los Angeles, I guess it was two weeks ago now for KubeCon Cloud Native Con. And first of all Linux Foundation did an amazing job creating as safe an environment as possible for us to do an in-person event. And it was great to be in-person they got. I don’t want to belabor it but this stuff is good on Zoom, it is better in-person. 

One day maybe we’ll run this as a live panel from a KubeCon, and that would be just great. But it was all Observability all the time, it seemed. Several things with Observability. Number one, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I go to a major show. And there’s something that’s so hot, so hot, that I just feel I can never live up to its promise. And that is what I was afraid with you all. 

Are we in a overhype cycle around Observability. And then secondly, so much of Observability is based on open-source underpinnings, if you will. Right. There’s a lot of great open-source programs. Maybe that’ll save us from the usual hype cycle that we get here, I don’t know. Anyway, I’m interested in your comments on that, is Observability being overhyped at this point?

Dotan Horovits: If I may take the first pass on this one. I think that as many trends, and we’ve seen the quite a few of those thought out the years, you have so many vendors trying to piggyback on the trend and leverage that for the relevant offerings that it creates a bit of a blur and confusion about what exactly Observability is about.

Is it about tooling or methodologies? Is login in its own right for vendors that just provide, let’s say, login of vendors just provide metrics is that Observability? And can you rebrand for Observability yes or no? You have two of these, is that enough? Is signals the whole story about Observability at all? Or is the discussion about Logz metrics traces do justice to Observability?

I think these are the sorts of conflict and confusion that I see and sense in my conversations with the user community, with customers of ours, with partners of ours. And, again, lucky enough in my position as an evangelist, I use my time to try and clarify and try to separate between the tooling and the methodologies and the essence of things. But definitely, a lot of confusion around that.

Alan Shimel: A lot of confusion. I did an interview or a panel discussion yesterday with some folks. And one of the things, there was a good line that came out of there was actually around the definition of DevOps, but it’s equally, I think, applicable here, which is, what is Observability? And all of these kinds of things you mentioned, Dotan is, where is the value? 

Show me where the value is in and I’ll show you what it is, who’s using it, who’s doing it, who’s not. Where is the value? Constance, one might say you were into Observability before it was cool, before it was hyped.

Constance C.: True. Yeah, right, because that was one of the selling points of Envoy, was making things transparent to the networking to everyone around. And one of the features that made people really love the project was that we would joke, there’s a staff for that. You would send a request, there would be staff for the connection, and everything related to it, and so that made things really easy to debug as a consumer of it. 

Dotan, you’re definitely right in terms of so much confusion because observably can almost be like the block-chain. And no offense of block-chain, but that’s like the key word that gets thrown around in terms of getting really hip and cool. I think the nice thing about this attention is that it is forcing a lot of people to start thinking more about why they’re doing things.

There’s a lot of just doing things because you’re either told to or your thought about and now sort of be like, hey, if you’re going to do something, we’ve always asked how do we know at work, but it’s like, oh, let me just write a test. Now it’s a little bit more like how do I systematically know it works by either adding instrumentation so I can consistently monitor it or observe it. 

I think that is a really good thing that we need to start moving towards, because it’s a little bit more of a, we still check something in, throw it over our shoulders and be like, whoa, good day, everyone. And we’re starting to think a little bit more that sustainability. 

And I also think there’s a second part too, especially when it comes to these projects that were mentioned earlier, we’re not just thinking about tools anymore, we’re sort of seeing them as products and starting to actually say why this could matter to you, why you should actually adopt them. 

And that’s something that as engineers, it’s not in our normal toolset in how we think about things, we’re starting to get better at, because we need to start. We’re also selling things for open source, the currencies, commits and contributions and not necessarily money.

Alan Shimel: I think that’s super important. To the question, is it overhyped? Will it be overhyped? Yes, yes. And whatever the next question is, yes. But I think what Observability has going forward is two big things. One is it started from open sources, it started from a community. Second was trying to solve a real problem around as we move to micro-services’ architecture containers.

How do you manage this stuff? How do you understand what’s happening? I remember Constance, you’re on a podcast we did together, we were talking about how do you know what happened where, what’s doing what, and what do these things do, to use generic terms, but what is it? So we’ve created this flexible, malleable component containerized architecture. 

Now how do we understand it? We operate it and improve it over time. I guess the other thing we were talking to, you said software engineers, developers, operations people, they’re not into marketing hype. They’re pretty real folks. They want to know, are you solving a real problem for me or is it a checkbox and you’re calling it monitoring observability?

So we have a pretty healthy skepticism in the market too that will fair it out, I think in most cases, what’s real, what’s not. Where the value is, to your point, Dotan. Okay, go on.

Dotan Horovits: If I may just add on that, one of the benefits of the open source tools that we’ll talk about and standards, by the way, it’s not just tools, it’s also standards, such as OpenMetrics and others, is that it’s usually driven by real needs of real companies. Actually, today, I had an episode with a gentleman, senior SRE, site reliability engineer, from Google in charge of the entire identity services package of Google. 

So when you log into your Google account, it goes through their micro-services. And many of the tooling that they use, and they’ve been using for a couple of decades, is the predecessor of what we currently talk about at the CNCF and many others. So obviously, Kubernetes itself, the containerization is a successor of Borg, their internal containerization orchestration system. 

And then you have Google sensors that evolved into open sensors that now is emerged into OpenTelemetry together with OpenTracing. And you have the Dapper project that very, very fascinating research paper about distributed tracing that was, I guess, the forefather of Zipkin open source and the Jaeger open source and many others in the industry. 

The nice thing is that Google’s scale is such that where we are at today was where they used to be a couple of decades ago. So in a way, these are well rooted within realistic problems at scale in micro-service architecture, in containerized environment, cloud native environments and technology. 

So I feel much more confident basing Observability standards, tools and practices on the open source rather than on some vendor initiatives that again, might be inspired by some strategy and might have some forecasting behind it. But much less solid ground around Observability practices hands on.

Constance C.: Two things I want to add to that, one is like, I think, I guess this is one of the things I want to keep on advocating for, is that I think we should get more just for nitpicking by cognitive doesn’t actually mean containerization. I think it’s just —

Alan Shimel: And it doesn’t mean Kubernetes necessarily either.

Constance C.: Exactly. Yeah, that was actually one of the points I was trying to make is cognitive is like any of the things there. But it’s more just I want us to dump that because a lot of people when they think about, oh, let me modernize my stack, I’m going to go straight to containerization. But that might not be the problem that they actually dissolve. 

And so that’s just one thing I want everyone to be aware of when people are talking about cloud native is like, what is the problem I need to solve when you’re upgrading your stack, remodeling your house, thinking about that problem there? And I guess, I don’t know, Alan, if you want to talk to us now, but the vendor influence. The vendor influence is really interesting.

Alan Shimel: I was going to bring that up. Let me jump into that. So let me just also lead off with this stuff. Look, Gartner has been doing a hype cycle for as long as I’ve been in technology, 25, 30 years. And the hype cycle is real. That is the way our industry works. Things get really, really overly high, they do the trial, disillusionment, and then they become productive, or whatever that end stage is. 

What’s a little different about Observability is it’s in this new foundational era of open source, where you have, as I said, several really good open source projects that are driving so much of the Observability innovation out there. None of those projects are controlled by a single vendor. 

They’re owned and managed by Linux Foundation and maybe some other foundations, which creates this whole golden era of coopetition, to your point Constance, among all the vendors. And this is a very interesting thing. So everybody starts with that same base. When Mitchell and I were doing vulnerability scanners 20 years ago, you could use the open source that was Nessus.

Nessus was still open source then. You could use the Nessus scanning engine but there were proprietary scanning engines that people were using, some of them really based on Nessus some not. Not the case here. Here, you got a company like Logz, and Dotan, I don’t mean this in a bad way. But you got a company like Logz, for instance, almost their entire value prop is built upon open source. 

Built upon that open source. I spoke to the Splunk people, their observability stuff, built upon open source. I’m just made mentioning that because we’ve got the two of you here, but there’s a lot of observability vendors out there. And they’re all built upon the same open source foundational tools. 

I don’t know if we’ve had this kind of coopetition in a market like this in years past and in times past where, look, everybody starts at that same level and what you do with it. Who makes the best observability solution? I don’t know, I guess it depends on really what your needs are. 

But it’ll be very interesting to see how in the real world laboratory of market conditions, people all come from the same open-source base, and what the value add is on top of that.

Dotan Horovits: I would challenge two points there. First of all, we started the discussion from the CNCF and from the Linux Foundation, and we can add on top of that, the Apache foundation and others. But let’s bear in mind that many popular tools out there still are controlled by vendors. We can talk about the ELK Stack, ElasticSearch —.

We can talk about the Grafana that is highly popular, and it’s controlled by Grafana Lab that actually rebranded itself to Grafana to be synonymous with the open source. So there is another beast out there, open sources that are very popular and very well adopted and very mature, but then again, not controlled by a foundation and this various implications. 

I guess the most prominent implications are when these open sources are then being relicensed to some degree. So users one day wake up to find that the open source on which they built the entire system around is suddenly being pulled of the open source [crosstalk].

Alan Shimel: One day we woke up and Nusses was an open source anymore, it wasn’t like that. But that’s exactly the point that I was making with foundational open source and why CNCF and these kinds of foundations —, Apache, whatever, it’s so great. And I’m not picking on Grafana, I happen to like Grafana, I like Loki as well, which is another Grafana project. 

But the very fact is, if you have one company that’s controlling an open-source project, other companies are very often hesitant to contribute. They may use it for now, but they’re hesitant to contribute. And so in the long run, and I’ve been in open source, Mitchell will tell you, we’ve been in open source 25 plus years. 

Over the long run the foundational model where you can have coopetition among various vendors prove superior to what I call the big brother open-source model where you have one vendor who owns that, and can pull it at any time or calls the shot. If I’m a VC-funded company, a unicorn or a public entity, and I’m investing 10s of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, I want to be very careful that I am not dependent on an open-source project that is controlled by a single company. 

This may be getting off observability and I’m sorry for getting on my soapbox, but I think this goes to the reason why CNCF and that community is so vibrant. It’s so much vitality, why the projects coming out of there are so popular and really changing our game. I look at observability because companies feel like everyone gets dealt the same hand, what you do with it is up to you. 

No one’s going to pull the rug out from under you. And Constance, you’re on these boards so I’m sure you probably feel that way, but I’m interested in what you all think?

Constance C.: The vendor has such a dirty word in like CNCF like KubeCon, Cloud Native Con, and open source. Okay, I’m putting on my vendor hat. Well, I’m actually putting on both hats, the vendor hat and also the contributor hat. One thing that the vendors have is that there’s a little bit of superpower. 

And maybe we don’t as vendors or as leverages, is that we actually get to see a broad spectrum of how things are used. And if we’re doing a good job in terms of like, hey, we’ve seen these things like 10 times over and over so that we think this is really important and bring this to the community that could really help the community. 

I think sometimes the messaging gets lost, because we’re just like, hey, we need this thing here and not explaining why about there. I think that’s sometimes why vendors get a bad name. It’s such a dirty word within open source, because you feel like, oh, you’re controlling how we want to use things, you’re going to make us buy these things there. 

If you look at our stats, I can’t remember what the stats are on top of my head, a lot of our talks come from vendor companies because a lot of things we use, they’ve contributed so much time into it. I’m only saying this because I’m trying to make it less of a forbidden word. Because they do have valuable insights, and they do contribute a lot. 

Then there’s also the end user part who has a lot of different use cases that vendors wouldn’t necessarily see. I also think for like some of the examples you mentioned, it might just be a matter of time before they move over to more CNCF. Because a lot of like, OpenTelemetry is still new, two-ish years. I guess, everything within CNCF are about six, seven years, so really, really new. 

I think it’s just more like continuation of time, as CNCF is, as you can still see, it’s so new that it’s like iron itself out. It’s starting to be, you could say, the de facto place where a lot of people look to, to donate their projects and be a part of that community. 

KubeCon and Con keeps getting crazy, crazy numbers of attendees and participation, it’s going to become more and more projects start coming to it, because there’s more of that trust, and it’s a little bit more of a matter of time. I like your, what was it?

Alan Shimel: Coopetition.

Constance C.: Coopetition. I’m starting to see it less and less. My scope is OpenTelemetry, I will say I wanted OpenTelemetry be like, we’re all vendors, you’re little skeptical. And as I’m leaving the GC now is like, oh my goodness, just seeing so many different people’s, so many different companies’ perspectives on what customers are targeting, what problem we’re trying to solve.

And start to view these people at first, I’m like, who are you? It’ll now be like, setting up one on one fairly regularly. Talk about careers and life. We go to open source to collaborate with others who are working on projects that are similar to us or probably they’re similar to us. And this was like another avenue to see the more people and get to know them.

Dotan Horovits: It’s important to say I work for a vendor — that also contribute to OpenTelemetry and to Jaeger and to others. So definitely I agree with you entirely that the know-how within these companies and the broad perspective of different use cases across different verticals, industries, geographies, gives a very valuable perspective.

It just requires the right mindset of the vendor, because even if you look at the evolution, specifically around observability, players such as Datadog, New Relic and even Splunk started off with a proprietary agent that did very intelligent things. 

I agree entirely that the ability with a proprietary agent to fetch the right telemetry, to enrich it with the right metadata to do the right aggregations, to fine tune it to the backend tool, storage and analytics and visualization, that’s perfect. But then again, it is very vendor locked. You can’t correlate across different vendors across different signals, assuming that not the same vendor serves all signals. 

And that’s what the driver that brought us to OpenTelemetry. And gladly is to say, and by the way, today OpenTelemetry is the second most active project under the CNCF according to the DevStats, CNCF DevStat. It’s really amazing to see. That essentially brought the vendor to their realization that the locking through agents is no longer the future path. 

And they’re aligning with OpenTelemetry and even contributing know how around the agents back to OpenTelemetry. And now the differentiating factor is within the collector, doing intelligent processing, aggregation and the power of visualization based on that. And that’s the right play, and that’s the play that evens the playing field because everyone gets the same raw telemetry and the raw signals. Now, it is up to you to draw the most value out of that and bring it to the end.

Alan Shimel: That’s exactly what I was trying to say.

Mitchell Ashley: With your point, yeah.

Alan Shimel: That was exactly. I’ll take it one step further. It’s not just the CNCF. We do another video show on here with the open mainframe project of all thanks. Another Linux Foundation project. And it’s really an umbrella for 26 different open mainframe-related projects. It’s the same thing. You got Broadcom and IBM and Rocket and BMC, and many others all working together to be able to do like DevOps on mainframes, project Zoe and stuff.

The CDF, Continuous Delivery Foundation, same thing. You got all the CD vendors in there.  Yes, there are the Grafanas there. Are the big brother open source players left there? This is the foundational era of all, and mean no offense, why like foundation. 

But this is the foundational era of open source. You just said, Dotan, that’s it. That’s it. You can’t beat that. And that is why the Splunk and the New Relics and the rest of the world have come around to recognize that as well.

Mitchell Ashley: Maybe [crosstalk] Alan. May be just kind of fanboy for a minute. What’s really awesome about this conversation is that we’re coming to it from multiple points. It isn’t just about let’s start an open source project, and that grows up into its evolution and becomes popular, etc. That’s one point of entry. There’s other points of entry, the proprietary. 

We started here, now this has sprung up and we need to, maybe in some cases, companies are forced to. You have to, to be competitive, because something like OpenTelemetry has really become so foundational, to use that word, Alan, that that’s critical. You have to be part of that community, and maybe even have to contribute to be able to do that. I’m referring into a genuine vendor here. 

And of course, tomorrow, someone else will start. And they’re going to start from where we are today. So what’s cool about this open source, it isn’t one thing, it isn’t one way of starting and one place of starting. You may be, like you were contributing to some early projects when you were at Lyft Constance. 

Or you may be starting the next company, Dotan, that you’re going to build on OpenTelemetry and maybe one or some other projects, you’re going to join Jaeger, whatever, starts something new. But my point is, it’s not one thread through it, it is multiple threads. 

But having an underlying activity that is bigger than any one of us, that we are contributing to, that it sort of advances the scrum as we move down the field, so we’re heading in a direction that sort of the rising tide lifts all boats kinds of things, yes, we’re all going to compete. And some people are going to only be interested in sort of their pure open source work. 

And that’s what I’m going to do. And that’s how kind of a developer I’m going to be or what I’m going to contribute to. Others are going to say, how do I productize? How do I commercialize? How do I build something on top of that? Because I have some great ideas too, to develop it. And that’s what’s cool, how far open source is come from, when Alan and I tried to build some products on earlier open source stuff and to where we are today.

Dotan Horovits: And that’s the beauty. The beauty is that, many talk about open source in the context of community in the greater good and everything, but then it’s important to say it is also a viable business model. It’s [crosstalk] one that you can build a viable business model, unlike some that claim that they cannot sustain it going forward. 

And use that as an excuse maybe to take it off the open source or things like that. Actually, just look now, last week, or this week that chromosphere became a unicorn raising 200 million with a one point something billion dollar valuation. And that’s all based on M3DB or M3 that spun out of an internal Uber project, Uber engineering that developed its own time series database, scalable Prometheus, if you’d like, database in terms of time series storage.

And now it’s a company in its own right with its own open source, in addition to a commercial offering. Now they’re expanding from metrics to also distributed tracing, as far as I understand. So it is happening. It is accelerating, actually, innovation, including business innovation, including new startups. It has sprung up around observability. 

And it’s a very exciting thing to see that as the open source by polar signals that there is now around a continuous profiling in observability. You see that from all angles, and you see startup and innovation. And I think it’s fueled by and facilitated by the open source. And that’s something that they think is great.

Alan Shimel: Absolutely. So here for me was the key sort of switch that switched, that enabled this. There was a time when we used to talk about the only open source business model that ever succeeded was Red Hat. That was a common thing you used to hear. And why? Because you look at some of the early open source commercial models, and they were about what we offer support and training. 

And that was like, how do I monetize open source? You do support and trainings really. Well, that’s not a great model. That’s been proven, not a very lucrative model. Then we started doing some open core, premium modules. So I’m going to give you bare bones and if you want the good stuff, you pay me for it. And that was the model. 

And look, there’s still companies doing that sort of model, it’s viable. Some people have problems with it, is it really open source? I think it is, but another story. But today, what we have is, Dotan, what you’re talking about. And I think, frankly, SAS has been the great enabler of this. Because now, I can take this open source project, set it up as a SAS app that’s going to do it for you. 

You know what? People understand that these things cost money to develop, maintain, and deliver. And if I’m getting it as a SAS app like that, and I’m paying monthly or subscription, whatever your subscription is, that’s the way business is done. That’s the way software is done today, whether it’s observability, or anything else in this cloud native world. That has been the enabler.

Yeah, it’s open source, but I’m getting it as a SAS app, this is what it cost, and I’m good with that. I don’t feel like I’m getting something that I should be getting for free. Ron Gula, who started Tenable Network skewed. I don’t know if you guys know Ron. But Ron always used to say, look, with open source that’s free as in freedom and free as in beer. 

We’ve concentrated on the free isn’t freedom with observability. It’s not necessarily free as in beer. And I think that’s a key mind view that we need that’s enabled, quite frankly, Logz success. Dotan, right? People say yeah, maybe built on open source, but I’m getting real value out of it. And they’re packaging it all up for me and building on top of that. I’m willing to pay for that.

Dotan Horovits: I would like to even reiterate what Constance said before because when you look at the vendors, the vendors actually bring value here. The vendors, say, okay, I will make the open source accessible to you. But then again, open source projects, and Constance probably can say a lot about that from Envoy and others, very focused on the core functionality, the core value proposition.

But for a much more mature organization, it needs an entire wrapping around it that provides DSSO and the authentication, the certifications and all the administrative aspects. The open source developers are not even bothered with that. Even a more powerful UI and an accessibility and user management control agents who are back whatever. 

And this is the wrapping that vendor with again, vendor that serves enterprises and knows all these needs can augment the open source with these capabilities. I think Splunk is doing it magnificently with enterprises and Logz.io and many others.

But the idea is that okay, you have the open source that you know and love but the open source beyond having it in a managed version also needs some additional layers to get it to be a commercial grade or enterprise grade. So it can actually be acquired that whatever you run is certified, meets the criteria that you need to run it within your organization at scale. 

Constance C.: So I guess I’m going to say I’m very disappointed all three of you. I guess you didn’t watch my keynote.

Alan Shimel: No, I didn’t. I apologize. But tell us.

Constance C.: Okay, so I don’t necessarily know if it should be offered. Some things shouldn’t be offered as like the vendor implemented for you. But the main thing, one of the points I was trying to make that CNCF is more than Kubernetes. That’s why I was calling out the Cloud Native. We don’t think the — hold it. But the next thing for CNCF you have to keep.

Actually let’s use it like the hype train. CNCF is on this hype train. And it’s great, because it’s celebrating all this hard work. I’m going to say as a community, we actually deserve quite a bit of attention, because we’ve done a lot of great work. But for us to keep on having celebrations like KubeCon Cloud Native Con, and community based, and just having these fun discussions, we need to make sure that we think of CNCF as a whole product. 

And each project needs to think as a product. And we actually need to start thinking about integrations. Because as CNCF as a whole, we have great projects here. But there’s no glue between them. And so once you drop one project, sometimes you get some other project for free. But if you’re trying to integrate multiple things at once, you get a hard time.

You don’t get any freebies once you implement, say Kubernetes and you’re trying to implement Envoy, both things there. No overlap, and so we need to start thinking about from a more together. I don’t honestly know that should be offered to SAS, I actually think that – I know, there’s a bit of debate about should there be CNCF Stack. 

But I think that we should probably actually have something easily set up 10 projects that were really great together. All look great. And that can help things there. The thing that I really like about where observability space maybe for the value add as vendors, is like the key distinction. For OpenTelemetry, it’s about instrumentation data collection. That’s where our boundaries are specifically set. 

We will never do anything about visualization. We’re trying to make you gather your data and then after, you can choose how you want to interact with that. There’s a little bit of that boundary that I think are being set around projects of where things go, because you can either try and almost be just kind of gobbling everything up, everything around you. Or you set your boundaries and then you have to let something else track there.

Alan Shimel: Sorry, I think that’s a CNCF decision. They have to make, like for instance, how many service match projects do you are under CNCF.

Constance C.: Well, so that’s a no kingmakers rule. Like we do have an explicit rule about there being no kingmakers, because we do want to offer things right. Because I’m biased that I love Envoy, but for some people Linkerd works great. And that’s amazing because there’s all these things there. Some people really love Prometheus, I think open source is great. 

Metrics is not necessarily equal there. There should be different option because things work better for other there. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t maybe say have like, I don’t know, a few CNCF Stacks. Like these 10 things work great here, these 10 things work there. And this is actually going to be more on the engineers, because CNCF does have more of the model of the open governance so you choose your own adventure. 

But then you see a little more of, it’s this great thing about open source, you choose your own adventure but we also need to think a little bit more like PMS, because marketers and salespeople are thinking about what the future will be. Because if we just implement the next thing, like go faster build all those things there, you’re not going to have sustainability to project.

Because I think the thing that we’re taught, everyone’s like, okay. This is almost sold as this is the last big project you’ll ever adopt. 

Alan Shimel: Agree.

Constance C.: But we’re not. And if we don’t think about the future, sorry, everyone, you’re going to have another rewrite in 5 to 10 years.

Alan Shimel: Guys, we’re about out of time, I got to ring the bell here as I said in the beginning of our talk. But you know what, look. I didn’t take the prerogative of taking the last word because I’m the host. We are in a golden age of open source innovation right now. And we have been for the last couple years. And I think CNCF in similar kind of foundations have ushered this golden aged. 

And there’s a lot of companies including Logz and Splunk, and many, many others who are constantly innovating and pushing what we can do off of this foundation, and I mean foundation of open source. And I don’t know how long it’ll last until we go into a post-cloud native world, I don’t know. I may not be here, but I do think when we look back on this, it is a golden age.

And it’s going to be very interesting to see what the next short-term, because who knows long-term, what the next short-term future holds and especially for observability. Observability is kind of the poster child right now for what we can do. That’s my poster post right there. Anyway, on that note, I think we’re going to close this one out. 

Constance, thank you so, so, so much for joining with us today, this was great. I apologize, I had that little network outage there and I don’t have you guys up on my usual monitor. So I keep looking over here to my computer. But thank you for joining us. Dotan, as always, a pleasure to have you on my friend. I look forward to being able to see you soon. Yep. And then of course, Mitchell. You want to take the last word, Mitchell, and we’ll wrap it up.

Mitchell Ashley: I’m going to leave it right where you said it. You just said it perfectly. Let’s end there.

Alan Shimel: Okay, then. Hey, we’ll be back in just a couple of weeks, two weeks I think, with our next Observability At Scale. It’s a great series if you’re interested in observability. Check it out. But for now, this is Alan Shimel, TechStrong Group. Have a great day.

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