Workshop: Three Pillars of Observability: The Open Source Way
Modern observability requires correlating metrics, logs, and traces—but many teams struggle with vendor lock-in or complex self-hosted infrastructure. This workshop teaches production-ready observability using open-source CNCF standards.
You'll instrument a microservices application on Kubernetes using OpenTelemetry, the vendor-neutral observability framework. Through four hands-on modules, you'll collect and correlate all three pillars: metrics (Prometheus), logs (OpenSearch), and distributed traces (OpenSearch trace analytics).
The workshop uses AWS managed services (Managed Prometheus, Managed Grafana, OpenSearch Service) for convenience, but all patterns apply to self-hosted deployments. You'll configure OpenTelemetry collectors with SigV4 authentication, build unified dashboards correlating metrics-logs-traces, and analyze service maps for performance bottlenecks.
Prerequisites: Bring your laptop. Kubernetes experience required. Familiarity with kubectl, AWS CLI, and basic observability concepts (metrics/logs/traces).
You'd better start believing in supply chains because you're in one
“I’m not a supplier!” open source maintainers correctly say. When a large company comes in making unfunded demands, it drives volunteer maintainers away. But supply chain attacks are a reality and they don’t just affect megacorps. As an open source maintainer, you have a supply chain, too.
Improving your security improves safety for everyone. But how can volunteer maintainers who aren’t security experts do this work? This talk introduces easy practices and tools to address common software supply chain concerns. Attendees will also learn how to address supply chain and regulatory concerns from their downstreams.
Your Telemetry Has a Story - Write It Down
Many teams ship ambiguous, poorly defined telemetry that hides errors, fuels tribal knowledge, and slows down troubleshooting. This session shows how to design clear, consistent telemetry signals and validate them automatically. Drawing on OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions, it covers practical patterns for naming metrics, spans, events, and their attributes, recording error information, plus a live demo of Weaver - a tool developed by OpenTelemetry community for documenting and enforcing telemetry schemas. These practices work just as well for Prometheus and legacy systems, proving how consistent, validated telemetry boosts reliability and cuts cognitive load.
Zero Trust for Linux Admins with Open-Source IAM
Zero Trust isn’t a product, it’s a design approach. And Linux admins already have everything they need to build a Zero Trust environment using entirely open-source tools. In this session, we’ll walk through practical, upstream-friendly ways to modernize access control without buying anything new. We’ll cover centralized identity using FreeIPA/SSSD, SSH certificate authorities to eliminate long-lived keys, group-based sudo rules, host-based access control, network segmentation, and how SELinux fits into a Zero Trust model. You’ll leave with concrete, copy-and-paste examples and a clear roadmap for making your Linux fleet more secure, more manageable, and far less dependent on “trusting the network.” This is Zero Trust for real-world sysadmins - practical, deployable, and 100% open source.
Zero-downtime Kubernetes migration of 14K Apache Pinot database fleet at LinkedIn
LinkedIn recently migrated its production Apache Pinot fleet from on-premises bare-metal hardware to Kubernetes with zero downtime. This tech talk will explore the technical journey, focusing on design choices, the challenges and trade-offs faced, and a balance of building custom tools versus leveraging existing solutions.
Key highlights include availability zone-aware data shard placement, automated OLAP table migrations with Airflow and Temporal, performance testing, pre- and post-migration validations, and disruption management. Lessons learned and valuable strategies for ensuring uninterrupted service-level objectives (SLOs) will also be shared.
`git push` to etcd: An Anatomy of Flux
What actually happens between a `git commit` and running Pods? In this session, Leigh will trace the instructions that make up a GitOps reconciliation.
We will peel back the layers of Flux's architecture, exploring:
- Native Go SDKs (no fork/exec) and `controller-runtime` queues
- API Machinery internals like Server-Side Apply, Resource Versions, and etcd
- Performance tuning using the Flux Operator dashboard
This session will be a fun, deep adventure. Come read some code with us!
“Millions-to-One, Words-to-Terms” – Generative AI Tools in Action for Rare Disease Diagnosis and Patient Data Harmonization
Precision medicine is constrained by two major data interpretation bottlenecks: the “Millions-to-one” challenge of filtering millions of genomic variants from next-generation sequencing to identify a single causative variant for molecular diagnosis reporting, and the “Words-to-terms” challenge of transforming unstructured clinical jargon into standardized, interoperable ontology terms. We present two novel Generative AI (GenAI) frameworks addressing these challenges. Both systems integrate contextual information with knowledge from curated medical databases and real-time web data. Evaluation using both open-source Kimi 2 and closed-source Gemini-2.5-pro yielded similarly accurate results.
