To get visibility into highly distributed applications, organizations often use various tracing tools that are best suited to each individual service owner’s specifications. However, when a request travels between services that have been instrumented with different tools, the trace data may be formatted differently, resulting in broken traces.

Developers and teams who want to deploy new code often and safely leverage feature flags to decouple code deployments from feature releases. Feature flags enable teams to release new features to a subset of users, making it possible to test a new feature’s impact on users and ensuring that developers can easily roll back the feature if it causes downstream issues.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is the premier event that focuses on cloud-native technologies and Kubernetes. This year’s European edition took place in person and was completely sold out, with 10,000 attendees. Datadog joined the event as a platinum sponsor, and several of our engineers delivered talks on various topics, ranging from etcd to image signing and verification. In this post, we’ll share more details on these talks, along with our takeaways from the event.

The pressure to release application features faster to meet the demands of customers presents a number of challenges, including unforeseen deployment delays, custom feature sets, and complex rollbacks when errors occur. To overcome these challenges, developers can use Flagsmith, an open source feature flagging and remote configuration service that allows developers to easily roll out and test new features for a specific subset of users.

When managing queues and services in streaming data pipelines that use technologies like Kafka and RabbitMQ, SREs and application developers often struggle to determine if these pipelines are performing as expected. Visibility into the performance of a streaming data pipeline, after all, requires visibility into every component of that pipeline.