Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry are both CNCF projects, and both are closely associated with modern microservice architecture. Despite their connection, there isn’t a single cohesive solution to monitoring your Kubernetes cluster with OpenTelemetry. Large teams that use complex clusters in production have generally ended up building their own tools for monitoring both their infrastructure and application code.

Container monitoring refers to the process of monitoring and managing containers deployed within a containerization platform, such as Docker or Kubernetes. As containerization has become increasingly popular in software development and deployment, monitoring and managing containerized environments has become increasingly important.

Kubernetes is an orchestration platform that allows containers to be deployed in an automated and resilient way, abstracting many of the manual steps of rolling upgrades and scaling. You will usually want to deploy database applications (like PostgreSQL) as well, so that your applications can leverage their features within the cluster. Deploying in a Kubernetes cluster lets you build out your cloud-native PostgreSQL instance.

The growing need for a secure software development lifecycle has prompted a discussion around the concept of “shift left.” Security has been treated at the end of the development cycle for decades, and software development has been mostly linearly planned. As cloud-native applications evolve and users demand real-time and 24/7 software services, scheduling security and testing at the end of the development cycle can create significant development, operational, and cost implications.

If you’ve been anywhere in the DevOpsphere in recent times, you have certainly encountered the Platform Engineering vs. DevOps vs. SRE debates that are all the rage. Is DevOps truly dead?! Is Platform Engineering all I need?! Have I been doing it wrong all along? These have become more popular than the mono vs. multi-repo flame wars from a few years back.