Biography

Philipp lives to demo interesting technology. Having worked as a web, infrastructure, and database engineer for over ten years, Philipp is now working as a developer advocate at Elastic — the company behind the Elastic Stack consisting of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. Based in Vienna, Austria, he is constantly traveling Europe and beyond to speak and discuss open source software, search, databases, infrastructure, and security.

Keynote

Observability is More than Logs, Metrics & Traces

Observability is More than Logs, Metrics & Traces You know the drill: DevOps is using tool(s) X. So obviously, observability can be solved by throwing some tools together as well; generally logs, metrics, and traces often called the pillars of observability.
But observability is not a tool — it is a property of a system. Moving from many small blackboxes to a more holistic view of your system. It includes tools, but not exactly three distinct features (especially if your solution happens to support those). For example, if half your user base cannot access your service because of some bad DNS settings and external health checks are not part of your pillars, you are none the wiser.
This is not (just) a rant, but a look at the actual value to be added and some approaches to it. Like turning your logs into richer events that align with your business. Which is not solved by fancy tools alone.

From Containers to Kubernetes Operators

“Containers are the new ZIP format to distribute software” is a fitting description of today’s development world. However, it is not always that easy and this talk highlights the development of Elastic’s container strategy over time:

* Docker images: A new distribution model.
* Docker Compose: Local demos and a little more.
* Helm Chart: Going from demo to production.
* Kubernetes Operator: Full control with upgrades, scaling,…

Besides the strategy we are also discussing specific technical details and hurdles that appeared during the development. Or why the future will be a combination of Helm Chart and Operator (for now).

Workshop

Live Kubernetes Debugging with the Elastic Stack

Your Kubernetes app is down. Your users start ranting on Twitter. Your boss is standing right behind you. What do you do?

This workshop walks you through a live debugging session without panicking:

• What do your health checks say?
• Where does your monitoring point you?
• Can you get more details from your application’s traces?
• Is there anything helpful in the logs?
• What the heck is even deployed?

We are using the Elastic Stack in this demo with a special focus on its Kubernetes integration with metadata enrichment and autodiscovery in combination with APM / tracing, metrics, logs, and health checks.