The Evolution of OpenTelemetry with Austin Parker

Austin Parker, Community Maintainer at OpenTelemetry, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss OpenTelemetry’s mission in the world of observability. Austin explains how the OpenTelemetry community was able to scale the OpenTelemetry project to a commercial offering, and the way Open Telemetry is driving innovation in the data space. Corey and Austin also discuss why Austin decided to write a book on OpenTelemetry, and the book’s focus on the evergreen applications of the tool.
About AustinAustin Parker is the OpenTelemetry Community Maintainer, as well as an event organizer, public speaker, author, and general bon vivant. They've been a part of OpenTelemetry since its inception in 2019.
Links Referenced: OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/ Learning OpenTelemetry early release: https://www.oreilly.com/librar....y/view/learning-open Page with Austin’s social links: https://social.ap2.io

Transcript

Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Look, I get it. Folks are being asked to do more and more. Most companies don’t have a dedicated DBA because that person now has a full time job figuring out which one of AWS’s multiple managed database offerings is right for every workload. Instead, developers and engineers are being asked to support, and heck, if time allows, optimize their databases. That’s where OtterTune comes in. Their AI is your database co-pilot for MySQL and PostgresSQL on Amazon RDS or Aurora. It helps improve performance by up to four x OR reduce costs by 50 percent – both of those are decent options. Go to ottertune dot com to learn more and start a free trial. That’s O-T-T-E-R-T-U-N-E dot com.
Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. It’s been a few hundred episodes since I had Austin Parker on to talk about the things that Austin cares about. But it’s time to rectify that. Austin is the community maintainer for OpenTelemetry, which is a CNCF project. If you’re unfamiliar with, we’re probably going to fix that in short order. Austin, Welcome back, it’s been a month of Sundays.
Austin: It has been a month-and-a-half of Sundays. A whole pandemic-and-a-half.
Corey: So, much has happened since then. I tried to instrument something with OpenTelemetry about a year-and-a-half ago, and in defense to the project, my use case is always very strange, but it felt like—a lot of things have sharp edges, but it felt like this had so many sharp edges that you just pivot to being a chainsaw, and I would have been at least a little bit more understanding of why it hurts so very much. But I have heard from people that I trust that the experience has gotten significantly better. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of me lobbing passive-aggressive bug reports at you have for you to fix in a scenario in which you can’t possibly refuse me, let’s start with the beginning. What is OpenTelemetry?
Austin: That’s a great question. Thank you for asking it. So, OpenTelemetry is an observability framework. It is run by the CNCF, you know, home of such wonderful award-winning technologies as Kubernetes, and you know, the second biggest source of YAML in the known universe [clear throat].