KubeCon Europe 2024 in Paris was the biggest event of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to date. With over 12,000 participants, it was a monumental event, setting the stage for the latest trends and developments in cloud-native computing. As your loyal CNCF Ambassador, I’m here to share some of the important updates you don’t want to miss. I also invited fellow CNCF Ambassador Thomas Schuetz to join me with his own insights.

In today's age of cloud services and SaaS platforms, continuous improvement isn't just a goal — it's a necessity. Here at Elastic, we're always on the lookout for ways to fine-tune our systems, be it our internal tools or the Elastic Cloud service. Our recent investigation in performance optimization within our Elastic Cloud QA environment, guided by Elastic Universal Profiling, is a great example of how we turn data into actionable insights.

Mainframes might seem like relics of a bygone era to many of us in 2024, but the truth, however, is far from that. Despite their reputation as ancient behemoths—and frequent targets of jokes—mainframes continue to be vital powerhouses driving the global economy. Their capability to process billions of transactions daily, including the majority of credit card transactions, underscores their enduring significance.

Observability is the ability to understand the internal workings of a system by measuring and tracking its external outputs. In technical terms, it entails collecting and examining data from numerous sources within a system to attain insights into its behavior, performance, and health. All organizations are now familiar with how essential observability is to ensure optimal performance and availability of their IT infrastructure.

Imagine a well-designed plumbing system with pipes carrying water from a well, a reservoir, and an underground storage tank to various rooms in your house. It will have valves, pumps, and filters to ensure the water is of good quality and is supplied with adequate pressure. It will also have pressure gauges installed at some key points to monitor whether the system is functioning efficiently. From time to time, you will check pressure, water purity, and if there are any issues across the system.

In the complex world of microservices and distributed systems, achieving transparency and understanding the intricacies and inefficiencies of service interactions and request flows has become a paramount challenge. Distributed tracing is essential in understanding distributed systems. But distributed tracing, whether manually applied or auto-instrumented, is usually rather coarse-grained.

Monitoring your data with dashboards and visualizations is perfect for improving the efficiency of your team and facilitating data-driven decisions from insights. They provide a different perspective to your data and by utilizing this data and trends you can clearly view if your system, application, or server is performing optimally, and if it isn’t performing as expected you can analyze where the issue is and promptly rectify this.

When discussing observability pricing models, there are three dimensions that must be considered The first, Cost per Unit, is an easy-to-understand metric, but in practice it is often overshadowed by a lack of transparency and predictability for other costs. The question is simple: how does a usage based pricing model impact these variables?

Monitoring applications that you’ve deployed to production is non-negotiable if you want to be confident in your code quality. One of the best ways to monitor application behavior is by emitting, saving, and indexing log data. Logs can be sent to a variety of applications for indexing, and you can then refer to them when problems arise.

The ELK Stack is a collection of three open-source projects, Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. They operate together to centralize and examine logs and other types of machine-generated data in real time. With the ELK stack, you can utilize clusters for effective log and event data analysis and other uses. ELK clusters can provide significant benefits to your organization, but the configuration of these clusters can be particularly challenging, as there are a lot of aspects to consider.