Career Pivots, OpenTelemetry, and Shifting to Observability 2.0 with Adriana Villela

Adriana Villela is a Sr. Developer Advocate at ServiceNow Cloud Observibility (formerly LightStep), Blogger, CNCF Ambassador, and host of the Geeking Out Podcast. In this conversation, we discuss Adriana’s brief pivot out of tech into photography, the beauty of rock climbing, OpenTelemetry, and the shift to Observability 2.0.

Where to find Adriana
Podcast: https://bento.me/geekingout
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@adrianamvillela
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianavillela/
X: https://x.com/adrianamvillela
Instagram: https://instagram.com/adrianamvillela
Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@adrianamvillela
O’Reilly Course: https://learning.oreilly.com/videos/fundamentals-of-observability/0636920926597/

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Transcript

Intro: 0:00

Adriana Villela is a senior developer advocate at ServiceNow Cloud Observability, formerly LightStep blogger, cncf ambassador and host of the Geeking Out podcast. In this conversation we discuss Adriana's brief pivot out of tech into photography, the beauty of rock climbing, open telemetry and the shift to Observability 2.0.

William: 0:43

Adriana, welcome to my fun and exciting and awe-inspiring and even sometimes a little mysterious podcast. How are you?

Adriana: 0:46

doing today? I'm doing great. It's Friday today, so I'm like super stoked for the weekend. How are you?

William: 0:52

I'm doing good. I've got one you know foot dipped in PTO, so next week I'm going to be out, so it's, yeah, double awesome for me. It's Friday and, yeah, there's nothing like PTO staring you down, so yeah super happy about that. Yeah, and so you're. You're up in Canada, right that unusual for Toronto.

Adriana: 1:14

These days, under like Toronto a la global warming has gotten very hot, so yeah, yeah you know what it's crazy so, and you know where I live actually.

William: 1:32

Uh, so right now I live in Kentucky, of all places, and it every year it gets a little more hot. A little more hot a little more hot and um the rain yeah, it's just. Weather is just crazy. Um, yeah, it's like right now back home. It's somewhere around like 98 degrees with pretty intense humidity, because we're in this like valley.

Adriana: 1:58

So oh yeah, humidity is no fun. I don't like the humidity yeah, we get a lot of humidity here too. I mean not not like you know Amazon rainforest humid, but like it gets fairly humid here in Toronto in the summer.

William: 2:14

Yeah, I've been up to Toronto a few times. I really enjoyed it. There was a few places I don't even remember the names of the restaurants because it's been so long, but I remember the food was just so good. The places that we went, because it's been so long, but I remember the food was just so good, the places that we went it was pretty awesome.

William: 2:32

It is a foodie haven, so do you want to just do, you want to briefly introduce yourself to the audience? You know who is Adriana and you know what do you. What do you do day to day?

Adriana: 2:37

Yeah, so my name is Adriana Villela. I'm a senior staff developer advocate at ServiceNow Cloud Observability. We were formerly known as Lightstep, but Lightstep was acquired by ServiceNow three years ago, so hence the new name.

William: 2:50

Awesome.

Adriana: 2:51

And so I have been in the observability space I guess for about three years, but I have been in tech for more than 20 years. I spent about 15 years of my career as a Java developer. I spent about 15 years of my career as a Java developer and then fell into the DevOps space, which then eventually led me into observability. And I got into observability because I was managing an observability team when I worked at 2Cows, and if you remember 2Cows, you know the place where you could download free Windows software.

William: 3:28

It was that two cows.

Adriana: 3:28

I was wondering if that was the one I was like, okay, it was, it was, but they pivoted their business so they no longer did that. I think when I joined they had just like they had kept that legacy site up until I think the year I joined. But at that when I joined then they were like a domain wholesaler and then they got into also the market of selling I think it was activating SIM cards as well. So then they did like a spinoff company anyway.

Adriana: 3:52

So yeah, but I got into observability because I was managing this observability team at two cows and I'm like, well, I know kind of sort of a little bit about observability, but not enough to manage a team. So I better educate myself on the observabilities. And so I did like a lot of reading, a lot of asking questions. I got on a few slacks, pestered a lot of people who were very kind to answer my questions, and then I documented my journey in my medium blog and and then it got the attention of my now employer who's like how would you like to do this for a living? I'm like giddy up.

William: 4:27

That is awesome. Yeah, that's a cool story Speaking of so. Like one of the reasons, well, one of the actually probably the thing I want to ask you the most is you know, recently on LinkedIn, you know a mutual connection, ned Bellavance, day 2 Cloud. Mutual connection, ned Ned Belovance, day 2, cloud.

William: 4:47

he posted this like little blurb about his journey you know from being like a nine to fiver, to going out and doing his own thing and ultimately landing like Ned in the cloud. And you replied with this really interesting and just really inspiring story of your own, like hard pivot to photography, and then, you know, followed up with an additional hard pivot. Would you mind just kind of telling that story? I thought it was really cool.

Adriana: 5:16

Yeah, sure. So I was at the time. I was working at a bank and I hated my job. It was like so boring, it was cushy, like I was making decent money for the time and you know, like I my daughter, I think was like three or four at the time and but I it was like the most uninteresting job ever. So I'd like I don't know like I could have like just coasted that. I'm not that kind of person, like I have to feel productive. It's probably the ADHD slash anxiety in me. And so I, you know, you know photography I've always liked photography. I did.

Adriana: 5:45

I dabbled in the dark room in middle school, um, took some really crappy um photos and even crappier negatives and prints that I developed. But it was fun and so I, I took, I I took a night school photography course and, um, it kind of made me fall in love with it even more and I thought you know what, wouldn't it be fun if I ran my own photography business? Because I love photography, I'm bored with this tech thing and just like I need something and it was. It was meant to be like the career change of, like peace, I'm out, bye suckers Nine to five lives, and but it turned out that, like so it was a learning experience. I call it the best, worst year of my life, um, because I had to run my own business. It wasn't just about taking the photos, it was about making connections, putting myself out there, um, making uh, like doing partnerships with other like local small businesses who weren't photographers but, you know, were adjacent. So I did a lot of family photography. So I partnered with, like there was a cafe near me that um also had like kind of a play area, um, so it was like very family friendly, very toddler friendly, so I partnered with them. And then I partnered with, like you know, like baby stores and stuff and I had to put myself out there, which was so hard because I'm so shy and it was like it took everything in me to do it. But I'm like if I expect to make any money whatsoever, I have to do this right. So I did that. And then I hustled hard. I put out like regular newsletters and I I did blogging. I would blog about client sessions and you know I offered discount sessions and I offered like what's called mini sessions, so it's like a 15 minute session where you get a smaller number of photos and it's. It's cheaper than like a full one hour session kind of thing.

Adriana: 7:44

And I played around a lot with like different marketing tools. So, like social media, I did paid ads. I did unpaid ads, like you know, just like through promoting through my social media, without doing like the Facebook boosts and stuff. I did print ads. I had to get good at Photoshop because I realized like yeah, it's great to get things right on camera, but sometimes circumstances just don't allow for that. Kid blinks, parent, parents for it's funny, because I did like candid photos and parents, for some reason, like they're, they're into like everyone's staring at the camera and smiling and I'm like I want to get those candid. So you know, um, closing your eyes because you're having a good time Wasn't necessarily okay with parents. So I had to like learn to Photoshop. Um, I swap, I did leg swaps even.

William: 8:34

Oh, wow.

Adriana: 8:35

Yeah, just to, just to get, uh, get things, you know just the way that, uh, that the clients wanted and, um. So I learned a lot during this time. I learned how to take better photos, I learned to not use cringy filters. You remember, is like. I want to say was like the early, like it was 2013 or so, maybe like oh, the crazy filter time.

Adriana: 9:02

So it was like it was like old ass instagram times where, like you know, everyone's like super into the filters and you know I bought all these like filters on on lightroom and I'm like this is awesome. And I remember I did some photos for a friend and thank god it was like a free shoot because she's like she was so polite about it, but I could just see the horror in her eyes and I mean, well, I'm like super proud of the work that I've done.

William: 9:27

I remember when that was happening because nothing looked real like. Some of those filters were so crazy that you just I know it didn't look real it didn't, it didn't.

Adriana: 9:34

So I learned pretty early on to not do that and just go for like a very natural um sort of look.

Adriana: 9:40

So lesson learned, so, but I had to learn a lot of interesting stuff to, like how to price my packages. That's so hard, and I realized that that translates into the startup world too. Right, if you're, if you're looking to put out a product, pricing is everything, because it's either going to scare off your clients or it's going to attract them to you. And and listening to your clients feedback, but also trying to understand who your ideal client is, that's another thing. Because you don't want to. You don't want to be like the discount photographer you know the Sears photographer that like, yeah, you get volume, but then like, are you proud of your craft? And I was very proud of my craft, so I want to be like the more like boutique photographer, but then that means like fewer people are willing to pay the prices that I needed to charge because I spent so much time editing the photos.

Adriana: 10:30

So you know, after a while, I and there were times where I made money, there were times when I did not, and thank you savings for keeping me afloat during this time. But you know, after a year I was at a crossroads where I thought to myself well, the I started like seeing some results on, on, like the tweaks that I'd made to my pricing and my SEO and all that stuff and I'm like, yeah, this, this could work. I mean, the first couple years of a business are the hardest. So it wasn't like I was looking to quit because, oh, I wasn't doing well. It's like it was the do I actually want to do this for the rest of my life? And when I realized the answer was no, and then I thought, oh, my God, this is so embarrassing. I told all these people that I was never going to return to tech. And then I thought, who cares, this is my life, I do what I want.

William: 11:21

Yeah, there you go yeah.

Adriana: 11:23

Yeah. So yeah, I got back into tech, but super reinvigorated and it was like it made me so grateful when I got back in. So I was like super happy and I think the role that I ended up taking on to when I got back which, oddly enough, was the same team that I had left under a different manager. So I got back into my old team through reputation because my coworkers vouched for me. But it was different work, it was more interesting work.

Adriana: 11:47

We were doing like a big product migration and I just sort of like I was brought in to do one thing and I just sort of stepped in and and started like orchestrating the whole migration, cause I'm like all right, this is not being done properly. So I came in like guns, a blazing and and just it became like it was interesting work to me. So it was never. I never had those moments where I was like sitting at my desk after lunch, almost falling asleep, because that's what kept happening and I don't ever want that again. You know, I want to be like always on, like I need, I need a stimulating, I need stimulating work.

William: 12:20

So yeah, maybe stepping away, kind of like that I don't know Perspective can just be. I mean, I know that, like several things have happened in my life where it changed my, like, my overall perspective, you step away for too long and you're just you lose out. You know you lose out on knowledge, on learning. The industry changes, technology changes way too quick, which is awesome, but it's also a double-edged sword.

William: 12:57

So that's just a really cool story. And it's cool because I mean, I work for a startup now, but I used to work for a lot of big enterprise companies and that was kind of like a thing like my rebel moment. I'm like, okay, if I'm ever going to go work for a startup, now's the time. Yeah, I don't want to do this when you know my kids are older and everything, and you know I need to be a lot more well-established with different things. So, yeah, it was really. I was like, Ooh, I'm going to work for a startup. This is cool.

William: 13:29

It's, you know, just different and yeah it was really motivating and just really awesome at the end of the day. But yeah, that's a thanks for sharing that. I just think that's a really cool story and, um, I think it, you know it kind of motivates because a lot of folks may have like an idea they they want to go do something but they're scared, they don't want to try it, they don't think maybe they can or maybe they think if they step away from their, their nine to five it's I talked to somebody the other day that's like, oh, you know, it's like wrong, you know I can't step, what you?

William: 13:57

have to have a nine to five and really you don't yeah um, you can, yeah, so it's. Yeah, just one of those things I I noticed on your YouTube channel that you appear to have a interest in rock climbing, which is super cool. No, no, hockey up in Toronto we're gonna rock?

Adriana: 14:13

yeah, I am not like. So I, as I mentioned to you before we started, I am not a sports person. I don't watch professional sports, but there is one sport I will watch. I will watch rock climbing on YouTube.

William: 14:27

That is awesome. When did you start doing that?

Adriana: 14:30

If you don't mind me asking oh, so I started doing it in 2002. And there's like different types of rock climbing. There's three types. There's there's sport climbing, which is the kind that you see like with the rope, and then there is speed climbing, which the goal is to get up the wall as quickly as possible. And then there's bouldering, which the walls aren't, aren't as high, I think they're like tops 15 feet high, which is still like scary, um, and you have no rope and there's a big fluffy mat to cushion your fall. But don't fall improperly, it leads to injury. So I got into like the sport climbing side of things, doing what's known as top rope, which it means that the rope is anchored at the top of the wall, so there's a person as you're climbing, there's a person belaying you, and then there's another type of rope climbing called lead climbing, which is basically you are, as you go up, you're clipping. I have not done that. That's a scarier form. So I got started in that.

Adriana: 15:28

And then my husband, when we met we met at work he was trying to like impress me, so he took up rock climbing to spend more time with me, which is so cute, and we did it together for a really long time. Then when my daughter was born, we had to stop because, like you know kids and then when she was old enough, we're like let's take her to the climbing gym. But we couldn't do the rope climbing because you need like two people and one of us had to like watch the kid running around. So we got into bouldering because then she could climb while one of us watched her slash climb next to her and then the other one could just do like their own session. Then we'd swap and she got into bouldering. So now we boulder as a family.

William: 16:15

That is so cool. I love that. That's awesome. That is so neat. Well, so at some point I'm going to ask you something about observability. But I'm digging this conversation right now the way it's going and I just got to ask so you, um, uh, I guess, so you have a tech podcast yourself called geeking out, right? Which is a very cool name, and you know what's even more cool about this? Uh, you know, is you run it with your daughter? I do, which is so cool. How did that start?

Adriana: 16:44

um.

Adriana: 16:44

So it started because, like I used to have a podcast through work, um called on call me maybe, which was an awesome name, um but then it was like so good and I, I, my, my, my co-worker, uh, anna, and I used to do it together and then, unfortunately, uh, we were told that there's no more funding for it.

Adriana: 17:04

But I'm like I still want to do a podcast and I was like I was, I was like so upset last year when we, when you know, we were told like it could not continue and I was like I, I was complaining to my daughter and I and and she's like you know, we could like start a podcast together and I could do the editing for you. And I'm like, really, because it's a lot of work to yeah, like we had um for on call me, maybe we had somebody like editing our, uh, our episodes and he would send it out for transcription and for geeking out, like my daughter hannah does, uh, she does the editing and then I use some ai tooling to do like the transcription and then I have to do, you know, human intervention, because sometimes it doesn't get the words right, so, um, so there's like so much prep um for an episode, and so I have like mad respect for all the podcasters out there who are like hustling hard because it is so much work to do and especially because we do like audio and video, because I want to like some people don't like just audio, like my dad is like. I hate podcasts, I only watch YouTube videos. I'm like okay, so there, I know there are people like that out there, so I try to cater to both yeah it's.

William: 18:20

You know what's funny about that? I used to only listen to podcast exclusively, like on walks and different things, but there's some conversations are really interesting when you can see facial expressions and different things. It kind of just adds that extra dimension. You know, it's pretty cool.

Intro: 18:34

So true.

William: 18:35

Yeah, that's why I do video too. I think it's just, yeah, it's cool, and I like watching them sometimes. So, yeah, how old is your daughter?

Adriana: 18:45

She's 16. And she's currently gallivanting around Europe with her school. They were there for the D-Day celebrations yesterday, so she sent me a picture where she is like literally like a few feet away from Prince William and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and we're like so jealous, oh man, why whenever I was in school.

William: 19:11

Why couldn't we do anything cool like that?

Intro: 19:14

we just like yeah and that is so such cool experience for her like yeah doing that kind of.

William: 19:20

But even like the podcast, like getting to you know her jumping in, I think that that is just so cool, like jumping in and saying, hey, I'll do the post processing, I'll help out, let's do this. That is so cool. Um, yeah, major props, hannah, that's, that's awesome. If you ever, if you ever hear this, you're, you're awesome. So I guess, uh, I also wanted to mention you. You have the. You released a course through O'Reilly Media Fundamentals of Observability. I think was that this year.

Adriana: 19:50

Yeah, it was this year, I think it came out. I want to say it came out in March. It was a year of blood, sweat and tears. I started like I did the proposal with them last year just before KubeCon Europe, so it was like around March, february, march, and then, yeah, and then it's been like a year in the making.

William: 20:09

They accepted the proposal and then it was like hustle, like my summer fall was like spent working on the course oh yeah, I know how much so I do LinkedIn learning content and I know how I mean it is a ton of work and it's like I was the last course that I did.

William: 20:25

I was already busy with my normal job. So a ton of work. And it's like I was the last course that I did. I was already busy with my normal job, so I was doing all of it on like weekends and like late nights. Oh it was, yeah it was. It was so hard. Yeah, major props in doing a good course too. Like you realize how much. Like, oh, I thought I knew this one piece of this topic very well, but then you realize, okay, maybe I didn't know it that well. And then you have to, you know, of course, augment your own research and your own understanding as well. But, yeah, super cool, I'll link that in the show notes, you know, so people can check it out. I might be checking it out too, because I need to brush up on the observability which is, yeah, so so big right now.

William: 21:03

And then, speaking of observability, let's I guess we got to get to the tech at some point but when I, when I started working in tech, like a long time ago, like organizations they did monitoring, they did not have observability, and that was riddled with these good old things called snmp strings, lots of things called MIBs, management information base, OIDs like this really old and just. It seemed to just transcend time for the longest time and until like cloud came along and then, you know, cloud really disrupted the status quo like all over the place. But you know, things have changed now a lot, obviously, and nowadays this is called observability and you know, I honestly remember I think it was when I first started hearing about observability more. I think it was like 2018, 2019 or somewhere along those lines when I started paying attention. But I guess we could start out with how would you define observability, you know, at a high level?

Adriana: 22:05

Yeah, sure. So I want to say, like the classical definition of observability which was coined by Charity Majors, which comes from control theory, which is the ability to look at a system from the outside and understand its inner workings without knowing the nitty gritty of the inside, so you can still understand what's up, right. And I think it's evolved a little bit from that. And now the definition of observability that I really like is from Hazel Weekly, which is the ability to ask meaningful questions of your system and get useful answers.

William: 22:45

I love that's. I haven't heard that one before. That's great charity majors. Isn't um honeycomb right?

William: 22:53

yeah, yeah she's the cto of honeycomb yeah yeah, brain, yeah, brain disconnect there, okay, that's awesome. Um, yeah, absurd, yeah. So, yeah, that's huge, and I think the more so like we used to have sort of like a technical landscape, like back with like the monolithic application design and you just had. You didn't have a ton of things that were sending telemetry, really, like you didn't have a ton of interaction surfaces, if you will. But now, like with apis, api, open source, there's interaction surfaces everywhere and everything is like more interconnected than ever. Yeah, you know, which is why you know that makes observability just hugely important. And I think you know one thing I'm hearing about nowadays is like this like the whole 1.0 and 2.0 moniker. Like I'm hearing like, okay, this transition from observability 1.0 to 2.0 moniker. Like, yeah, I'm hearing like, okay, this transition from observability 1.0 to 2.0. Like what does this mean? Yeah, so I think 2.0.

Adriana: 23:56

Yeah, so, so really, I think 1.0 was like our first attempt at observability, right where it's, it's kind of rising from the ashes of monitoring and so we're kind of feeling our way through it and it's still like very, very operations based and it's still very based on known unknowns, in the same way that monitoring was, and the idea that you know, you still like yeah, you've got your signals, like your traces, metrics and logs, but they're not necessarily correlated. Maybe you're putting a lot of emphasis on like your metrics or your logs, because that's something that we're familiar with. So that was observability 1.0. It's like we're starting to move the needle in the right direction.

Adriana: 24:39

And observability 2.0, which I believe was also coined by by charity is this idea of like coined by by charity, um, is this idea of like? Observability 2.0? I think is is what um is delivering on the promise of observability. So it's really dealing with those unknown unknowns, right, because, as you mentioned, like our systems are so complex, the interactions are just bananas, like we don't even know sometimes, sometimes like, and our users, our users bring chaos to our systems just by using our systems, because we can't predict how they're going to use them and that means that we can't predict how services are going to interact with each other. So, really embracing the fact that, like we don't know what we don't know, but let's make sure that we have the information at hand so that we can figure out what it is don't know, but let's make sure that we have the information at hand so that we can figure out what it is.

Adriana: 25:30

And it's also moving beyond this idea like, yes, we've got the signals of observability, traces, metrics and logs, which we refer to as the three pillars before and I hate that term because it makes them seem like they're siloed from each other. And really it's. And I was having the same discussion yesterday with Whitney Lee on her show Enlightening, and she described it as like oh, it's like a braid. And I'm like, yes, that's exactly it. It really is like these things are interconnected, because you have to have a correlation between these three signals in order to understand what's going on. What's going on but, most importantly, making sure that the trace is really front and center of your system, because the traces give you that end to end view of what's going on. And then the metrics and the logs are like the supporting characters that provide you that extra bit of information. So really, that's what observability 2.0 is all about is really fulfilling the promise of observability.

William: 26:41

That's such a good definition. Yeah, the crazy amount of interaction. So in my limited time with doing anything with observability, the biggest challenge honestly was, I would say, from a Greenfield perspectivefield perspective like, okay, part of our business, we have like new apps, we're building them, cloud native we have. We have apis, we have, we have standardized ways of retrieving data and doing things with that data. But then some of these things would be interacting with, like these legacy systems and it's like, okay, we don't have apis. In fact, what? What data can we actually get from this thing at all?

William: 27:13

And I think I, I really look forward to, you know, some of these older systems and older applications. You know some of them will be sunsetted, some of them will probably die in a data center someday. Um, some of them are going to be, you know, modernized with cloud or you know whatever else, and it's just thinking of like, okay, the future, like apis or like a currency at that point. And that makes the whole picture much easier, especially if you're not in like, if you're not a tech company and you're like an enterprise trying to leverage some of these things and garner like value from them. You know so, I think so the next thing I so you.

William: 27:55

You're part of the cncf, you're an ambassador right, yeah and you're in the um, the, the open, you're, you work with the open telemetry project.

Adriana: 28:06

Yeah, that's right, that's right. So I'm one of the maintainers of the OpenTelemetry end user SIG. So what we do is we try to connect end users with each other, share end user stories, because I think when you're getting started with a new technology like OpenTelemetry, you know it can be really scary. It can be really scary, and so it's really cool to be able to hear how different folks in different organizations are using open telemetry, like learn about their journey. So one of the things that we do every month or we try to anyway is do open telemetry Q&A where we sit down with an end user and they talk about how they use open telemetry within their organization, and so we we usually record these interviews and then we post them on the OTEL YouTube channel, which is called OTEL-Official, so you can see all of those interviews on there. We also do something called OTEL in practice, which is basically a meetup style sort of thing, where someone who has an interesting thing that they want to share about OTEL that they learned you have a talk about hotel, like come to hotel and practice and, and you know, share your talk, test it out If it's something that you're shopping around for different conferences or whatever great place to, to test it out and to just, you know, use that as the basis for iterating your, your talk concept or whatever. Also, it's such a great opportunity to share cool things with other folks in the community that they might not have known about OTEL so, and we have those on the OTEL YouTube channel as well, and then we run a bunch of surveys and user and user surveys. So, for example, the OTEL collector, so the OTEL collector for folks who aren't familiar, it's basically you can think of it as a data pipeline, so it's used to ingest OTEL data from your application, from your infrastructure, from wherever anything that emits OTEL. It can ingest data from there and then it can transform your data so it can be like and then it can transform your data so it can be like you can add or remove attributes, you can mask data you know, especially for PII data. You can use it to batch your data various like just various sorts of things that you can do it and then it exports the data somewhere, the somewhere being like usually an observability backend, or it can be your standard out on your um, on your machine, um and the um and so like the the collector, sig came up to us and said hey, you know, we really want um to get some feedback from users to drive the roadmap for for the collectors, so that we're actually developing features that are useful to the people. And so we ran the survey with them and ran it for about a month or so. And then we also did like a panel discussion. So we gathered I think I want to say four or five end users and we did like a panel discussion on Zoom, where you know we got some feedback from end users live getting to talk to folks on the collector SIG to again just to get that kind of feedback. So then we were able to collect that information and then disseminate it back to the hotel collector SIG so now they can do something useful. So we've done that. Also for there's a hotel and Prometheus interoperability working group. So they approached us for that.

Adriana: 31:33

We did a. We ran a survey on getting started with hotel, like what's your experience with getting started with open telemetry? What would you like to improve? Right, because open source I mean it's awesome that it's, it's free, but it's it also means that a lot of the folks who are working on it working on it on their own time or whatever like, there's always, there's always room for improvement. So these are the types of things that we, that we do with the SIG right now.

William: 32:00

That is so cool. I love the short form, otel, some of the short form for some of the tech groups and different things. You great work, um, and you know one. So one, one thing I want to ask um how does open telemetry fit into observability, like as a technology? What is the relationship there?

Adriana: 32:36

that is a really great question. So open telemetry is basically this framework for um emitting information about your system. So it's made up, so there's, there's the specification, and it's made up of an API and an SDK. So the API defines the behavior, the SDK implements the behavior, and so, and we, we've got like APIs and SDKs defined for various languages, like so many languages. Um, pretty much anything you can think of, I think, is there. They're even like there's even work being done on hotel for mainframes. So, um, yeah, there you go.

William: 33:20

Right, I worked in mainframe land for a while, in healthcare and yeah they're never going away. I don't think they're sticking around forever.

Adriana: 33:29

I know, yeah, I worked at a bank for 11 years and like mainframe is king. I actually got to tour a data center one of the data centers at the bank and there was the mainframe like in all its glory and like I was in awe of this thing. That's like running the bank yeah, they're cool.

William: 33:48

Like I think the last time I saw a zero downtime ibm mainframe at the last data center I was in doing work in, it was like maybe five years ago and they look like, they just look really cool.

Intro: 33:59

I'm like, wow, I I wonder if I could get one of those in my house it's just cool, like people would walk in and be like Ooh what is that?

Adriana: 34:06

It looks so futuristic.

William: 34:08

Yeah, and you open them up and they're just it's yeah, it's really cool, but at the end of the day it's, it's a mainframe, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adriana: 34:23

Yeah, so I how like the idea of the definition of observability the ability to ask meaningful questions and get useful answers. The only reason, the only way to do that, is you have to have information at hand to be able to ask those questions, and OpenTelemetry enables you to emit those signals that we talked about earlier, those traces, those metrics and those logs. And the cool thing about OpenTelemetry is that, because it's vendor neutral, it means that you know the different observability vendors are no longer competing on like whose framework is better. You're not spending mental capital on that right now, so it's got the backing of, like, most of the observability vendors. So a lot of us who work for vendors, we work on open telemetry. We contribute because it's something that benefits us all, and so the differentiator then becomes how? So we're all ingesting the same data. So the differentiator is how do we present the data to the user in a way that's useful to them to be able to do their jobs?

William: 35:26

That's such a good thing. I wish other technical verticals would. I mean, I think eventually they'll get there, but it, like you know, observability really seems to have its ducks in a row. As far as that's concerned, like having the okay, like where all these vendors agree and we have this foundation, that's, you know, providing a framework or a blueprint, and these are the. This is like the standard, the baseline where we're all starting from, and then we can add on innovation and value out there that we can create meaningful products upon, you know, but that's, that's what's so beautiful about the CNC app. It's just awesome.

William: 35:57

And I hope that catches fire with some of the other areas of technology, because some of the other areas are a little.

William: 36:04

They're pretty behind and they're still like vendors own a lot of stuff and all the vendors do it completely different and there's no agreed upon way of doing much of anything, because it's just a power grab a lot of times and yeah, so that that's awesome. That's to hear. How do you go about? So for the for the benefit of those listening in, how do you go about if you're interested in open source and you want to get involved with the CNCF Like, how did you become an ambassador?

Adriana: 36:39

The ambassadorship program has been around for a while, but I think they had closed it off to like new ambassadors for a bit, because I believe they were rejigging the process, like the whole program, and so I think it was last. So at the end of 2022, they had like opened up the admissions for the ambassador program and at that point I'd been working in open telemetry for, I guess, since I joined my current company, so it had been like less than a year. But they opened up the applications and I'm like you know I've been like very heavily involved in this community for open telemetry, but prior to that I'd done a lot of blogging as well on various things in Kubernetes. So at the company before 2Cows, they were exploring the possibility of moving to Kubernetes from, I think it was Azure App Services. So they were in Azure Shop and they were using Azure App Services and they're like, oh, maybe we'll use Kubernetes. So I was like playing around with I was the only one on my team who had I wasn't a release engineering team. I was the only one on my team who like had any Kubernetes experience. So I was like playing around and I'm like, oh, you know, if we're going to use Kubernetes. We should use Argo CD to like manage our deployments. But I didn't know much about Argo CD so I was like learning on the fly, blogging about it as it went along. So I'd done like a lot of stuff of just playing around with like different projects and blogging about my learnings as I was on this journey with this other company experience.

Adriana: 38:27

I've got you know the tech chops from writing my my various Kubernetes blog posts. I'm gonna apply and and you know it's just, I think, like for the application process, like you need to answer like you know what. What makes you a good CNCF ambassador? What are your accomplishments in the space? So they asked for like of like that, the things that you said you did, you actually did. So you know links to PRs, links to like. You don't even necessarily have to be like a yeah, I think there you do need to have like some sort of contribution to CNCF products, because I think they use something called DevStats to measure how much you've contributed in the CNCF ecosystem. If I'm not mistaken, it's a little voodoo-y for me how DevStats work. To be honest, someone in the CNCF ambassador group worked out something that could translate it. They created a tool that would translate it to us humans who don't understand DevStats.

Adriana: 39:24

So I'm like awesome, but um so but you know, proving that you've done the contributions that you say you've been doing and and how, how it is that you would benefit, um, that like how it is that you would contribute to the community as a cncf ambassador. So I applied and I got in um and I found out just before going to kubecon EU last year and then I renewed again this year and they renewed me this time for two years because I was a returning ambassador. So I believe the returning ambassadors they renew for two years. So that's how I got in. Yeah, just getting wind of the program.

Adriana: 39:59

I'm like I'm going to apply. You know like there's nothing to lose by applying and if you don't get in, then you keep at it and keep trying again next year that's awesome.

William: 40:10

Yeah, I'll you know. For anybody out there, it's worth just going and going to the cncf website looking at some of the different projects, and there's a slack as well. You don't have to be an ambassador to get in the slack.

William: 40:20

So join the slack and, you know, get some wisdom on what's going on in the open source world and where some of these products are headed and, like what, you know what's going on. It's super useful, really awesome stuff. Well, I think I was trying to get this episode in under 30 minutes and I always fail. Yeah, anyhow, I guess we better wrap it up, um. Do you want? Thank you again. Thanks for coming on. This has been a really fun conversation. Do you want to tell the the audience they can find you?

Adriana: 40:51

oh yeah, so, um, you can find me on all my socials if you go to bentome, slash adriana m villela, so a-d-r-i-a-n-a-M-V-I-L-L-E-L-A, so you'll be able to find all my socials on there all in one place for your convenience.

William: 41:10

Awesome, very nice, all right. Well, thank you and enjoy the summer.