I recently had the privilege of attending KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 in Paris. The conference, hosted by the Linux Foundation, marked the 10th anniversary of Kubernetes. Here are the key takeaways and highlights from the conference.

Without a doubt, you’ve heard about the persistent talent gap that has troubled the technology sector in recent years. It’s a problem that isn’t going away, plaguing everyone from engineering teams to IT security pros, and if you work in the industry today you’ve likely experienced it somewhere within your own teams. Despite major changes in the tech landscape, it is clear that organizations are still having significant difficulty keeping their technical talent in-house.

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.

We’re excited to bring you relational fields, a new feature that allows you to query spans based on their relationship to each other within a trace. Previously, queries considered spans in isolation: You could ask about field values on spans and aggregate them based on matching criteria, but you couldn’t use any qualifying relationships about where and how the spans appear in a trace.

Modern organizations face a challenge in handling the massive volumes of log data—often scaling to terabytes—that they generate across their environments every day. Teams rely on this data to help them identify, diagnose, and resolve issues more quickly, but how and where should they store logs to best suit this purpose? For many organizations, the immediate answer is to consolidate all logs remotely in higher-cost indexed storage to ready them for searching and analysis.

The volume of logs generated from modern environments can overwhelm teams, making it difficult to manage, process, and derive measurable value from them. As organizations seek to manage this influx of data with log management systems, SIEM providers, or storage solutions, they can inadvertently become locked into vendor ecosystems, face substantial network costs and processing fees, and run the risk of sensitive data leakage.

Today, almost every other business is using cloud-native technologies and practices to grow business and increase revenue. No doubt, the modern cloud computing approach offers several opportunities for businesses to grow but it is also creating a new set of challenges. As per a report, SaaS companies spend almost 19% of their total revenue on IT. If not handled these challenges properly, it will erode the anticipated advantages. In fact, many businesses are under high pressure to reduce their IT costs.

In today's cloud-centric landscape, managing and optimizing cloud resources efficiently is paramount for cloud engineers striving to balance performance and cost-effectiveness. By leveraging solutions like Tines and Elastic, cloud engineering teams can streamline operations and drive significant cost savings while maintaining optimal performance.

For SaaS platforms, utilizing observability is crucial, as it’s vital for these companies to deeply understand their users' experience and the root cause of any issues. Observability involves leveraging the appropriate tools and processes in place to effectively track, examine, and troubleshoot the performance and behavior of a system, even if you can't directly see what's happening inside it.