FOSDEM 2024, a story!

All the things FOSDEM 2024!

Another year, another FOSDEM in Brussels! This year’s FOSDEM happened (as usual) during the first weekend of February (3-4 February to be accurate). It was a blast, more than 8,000 people attending, all brilliant minds, exchanging ideas and socialising with each other. Lots of great talks, cutting edge technologies and brilliant content from small pet projects to bigger all around OSS solutions to bigger problems. In fact, some more numbers and other stuff that happened during FOSDEM can be found in the picture below!

(Just me wanting to flex my merch!)

CI/CD Observability talks

This year, I was one of the few lucky people to be able to present at FOSDEM, in fact two talks around CI/CD Observability and what we have done at Grafana Labs, using OpenTelemetry. Me and my fellow co-worker Giordano Ricci.

The content

As per the paper abstract:

A reliable CI/CD pipeline is the backbone of every modern project, yet there’s limited visibility into its processes, often requiring manual review and analysis of build outputs. By leveraging OpenTelemetry standards we want to bring observability to our pipelines, making the software delivery process fully observable. Join our journey redefining CI/CD observability, learn how you can start implementing the techniques we are using at Grafana Labs to ensure your pipelines are more reliable and stay performant over time, how to identify flakiness, bottlenecks, and how we envision a future where - no matter your system or your observability solution - we can effortlessly have full visibility over our software delivery process. You will learn what it takes to make CI/CD fully observable, how we think OpenTelemetry is going to play a major role in this, what obstacles we encountered, what are the challenges ahead and how anyone can help shape the future of CI/CD observability.

First presentation: Practical CI/CD Observability with OpenTelemetry, Testing and Continuous Delivery Devroom

Second presentation: What is CI/CD Observability and how to bring Observability to CI/CD pipelines, Monitoring and Observability Devroom

Small note: The content in both presentations as you can imagine is repetitive. You can choose any of them, just one is fine!

The experience

One word? Amazing. As I have written in a previous post of mine, sharing with the community is key. It was the first time I was presenting at a (big) conference, and I just can’t wait to be given the opportunity to do it again. We went from being nervous during the rehearsals, to enjoying the “stage” as much as possible. It’s just too much when you have to present something in front of so many talented people, and also watching them appreciate your presentation and coming up with questions. Definitely one of the most exciting things I’ve done in my career.

One thing that surprised me though was the way we delivered these talks. We expected to be really nervous prior to our talk, but it wasn’t the case when the presentation started. I guess it’s just a matter of knowing what you are talking about, being some sort of “expert” in your domain and this is the only way where you just know that things cannot really go wrong. At least content-wise, you know that always connectivity and technical issues are there for you in every presentation!

Just a glimpse of what I am talking about!

(tweet)

The outcome

The most important aspect of presenting at a conference like FOSDEM is connections with the community. We had many people reaching out to us, whether at the conference, at the booth, or after the conference asking to keep in touch since what we had presented was a really helpful use case for their own day-to-day work. I got to meet brilliant people, coming from different backgrounds and different continents, including people who didn’t have prior experience with CI/CD, or Observability but also received questions from people that actually didn’t know how to respond to because they were already 10 steps ahead of me!

Also, as we mentioned in our talks, what we presented had started as a hackathon project. The great reception we received from people during the conference made us think about how things could escalate so quickly - from an idea initiated at a pub, to something worth sharing with the community during FOSDEM. We are now trying to think of ways to make it more ready for people to experiment with this and receive as much feedback as possible.

The conclusion

No conclusion more accurate than “I want to go back there and do it all over again”! I had an awesome time at FOSDEM 2024, and I’ll do my best to be there again next year! Until then, cheers to everyone and to people who attended or watched the livestream of our presentation, couldn’t thank you more!

P.S.1: If any of you is interested in learning more about CI/CD Observability and what we do at Grafana Labs, can always join the #cicd-o11y channel in CNCF Public slack!

P.S.2: For people that not that much into watching videos, there’s also a blogpost we published a few months ago, and can be found here.