To be quite honest, the name David Lynch is one that merely rang a bell, I wasn’t too familiar with any of his films, and the closest I had gotten to his work was out of a recommendation from an old friend to watch Twin Peaks, a recommendation I got, as some would say, in a previous life. I’ve been meditating for quite some time - if you follow me or know me closely you likely have already and repeatedly heard my thoughts on mindfulness and meditation as indispensable elements towards realizing one’s own potential.

Over the past few months, I’ve been very focused on GitOps, becoming actively involved in the GitOps Working Group as a contributor in the GitOps Principles Committee. GitOps is a model that represents the next stage in evolution in terms of application and configuration delivery, particularly when we look at it in the context of Kubernetes. Kubernetes with its CRDs and powerful API, is growing to become more than just a container orchestrator, rather a control plane for… basically, everything.

The struggle with Data Don’t let anybody fool you, data is tough. It’s difficult to move around, and the more voluminous it gets, the harder it becomes to make sure it’s clean and reliable. Trying to solve data consistency and quality issues always feels to me like finding needles in haystacks, except it’s not haystacks, it’s 50-ton balls of mud. It gets even more complicated when you incorporate ML into the mix.

The innovator’s dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen is another one of those books that have become obligatory reading in Silicon Valley circles. The author looks at a handful of industries that have gone through multiple cycles of technological disruption, and attempts to identify what was it about some companies that allowed them to survive, while the majority, once exposed to such dramatic change, failed to adapt and succumbed. There were quite a few concepts exposed by Christensen that triggered my curiosity in terms of technological evolution, regarding organizational elasticity, and of course the controversial concept that doing the right thing might be the cause of your demise.

Before going into OpenTelemetry, the CNCF Project, I want to use the opportunity to also discuss some of the more fundamental concepts as to what telemetry and observability mean, as well as elaborate on the recent changes the industry has experienced in terms of evaluating performance, availability and more importantly reliability of digital products. What is telemetry and observability? Telemetry, in its simplest form, means gathering data that can be used to understand performance and utilization of your application across its multiple components, in other words, proactively and programmatically deliver data that can be used to track the behavior of your system as requests move throughout services.