I have just returned from what I can only describe as a whirlwind week that was the first KubeCon of 2025, KubeCon EU, which took place in London, England from March 31 to April 4. KubeCon is a massive conference, full of energy, great talks, and great friends, and my fellow Dynatracers and I couldn’t wait to get started. I gave three talks in three days, recorded interviews for the fourth edition of Humans of OTel, and recorded the second edition of the Humans of OTel Livestream. The following is a recap of my personal highlights from the conference and surrounding events.
Dynatrace speakers
We had a great lineup of Dynatrace speakers at KubeCon EU this year, with a total of 13 talks happening every day of the week. We kicked off the week on Monday with Henrik Rexed at Cloud Native Rejekts, and ended with Michael Beemer and Evan Bradley on Friday. You can see the full schedule of Dynatracer talks below!
Pre-KubeCon events
My teammate, Henrik Rexed, kicked things off on Friday, March 29th, with a pre-KubeCon livestream edition of Is It Observable, featuring CNCF Ambassadors and absolute cloud native heavyweights, Lin Sun (Solo.io), Abdel Sghiouar (Google), and Mauricio “Salaboy” Salatino (Diagrid).
Cloud Native Rejekts
Cloud Native Rejeckts is a two-day conference that takes place on Sunday and Monday before the main KubeCon event. This was my second time attending, but my first time not as a speaker. The Rejekts motto is: “Recycle your KubeCon talk here” …which means that if they’d rejected your KubeCon talk, you can submit it to Rejekts! Acceptance, of course, is not guaranteed, but it’s always worth a try!
Rejekts has a much more relaxed atmosphere compared to the frenzy that is KubeCon. It’s also quite a bit smaller, and much cozier. As a result, it’s a great way to catch up with folks who you would normally see at KubeCon, but who would most likely be too busy running around to stop by for a chat. Plus, it’s free to attend!
Henrik Rexed gave TWO talks at Rejekts, and I was able to catch the first one.
- In his first talk, The Service Mesh Wars: A New Hope for Kubernetes, Henrik compares and benchmarks five service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd, Cillium eBPF, Kuma, and Ambassador Edge) across multiple dimensions to demonstrate when and how to use them.
- Henrik’s second talk was called The Kubernetes Guardians: A Deep Dive Into Your Security Avengers. In this talk, Henrik and co-speaker Ben Hirschberg compare and benchmark four CNCF eBPF-based Kubernetes security tools (Falco, Tetragon, KubeArmor, and Kubescape) to help attendees decide which one best suits their needs.
Henrik is an excellent speaker, and his slides are always fun and engaging. I recommend catching one of his talks if you can.
PS: The conference venue was GORGEOUS!!
KubeTrain party
After the last day of Rejekts, I headed over to the KubeTrain arrival party, hosted by Dynatrace and Isovalent on March 31st. It was a ton of fun, and the best part was reuniting with my DevRel teammates Andi Grabner (aka “Mr. Dynatrace”) and Henrik. A few other folks also arrived in town that day whom I hadn’t seen at Rejekts, so it was nice to catch up. Also, the party featured a signature cocktail called the “Dyna-Tai”, and a signature mocktail called “Dynatrace Violet Crush”.
KubeCon
Official KubeCon events started on Tuesday, April 1st.
Co-located events
Although the main KubeCon conference started on Wednesday, April 2nd, on Tuesday, April 1st, the conference venue hosted a number of co-located events, including Observability Day, Platform Engineering Day, OpenFeature Summit, OpenTofu Day, ArgoCon, BackstageCon, and others. Like Rejekts, co-located events are always a great way to catch up with friends before the madness of KubeCon sets in.
I was fortunate enough to speak at my fourth Observability Day, this time with a fellow Torontonian, Marino Wijay of Kong, one of Dynatrace’s partner companies. Our talk was called “Putting the Experience in UX: The Importance of Making Data Accessible.” This talk was about using OpenTelemetry (OTel) outside of the traditional confines of technology. We already gather telemetry every day, in various aspects of life. OpenTelemetry provides us with a standard for generating, collecting, and emitting telemetry, and we have existing tooling that leverages OTel data to help us understand work processes and workflows. So why not extend these existing data ppints to edge use cases, such as employee onboarding, emergency room visits, and hiring?
I had originally crafted the talk proposal with one of my good friends, Tim Banks, who was unfortunately unable to travel to KubeCon. As a result, Marino took his place, and he and I crafted the talk together. I hope we made Tim proud!
Fun fact: Marino was my co-speaker at Platform Engineering Day in Salt Lake City last fall.
Ambassador Breakfast and KubeCon kickoff
As a CNCF Ambassador, KubeCon always kicks off with the Ambassador Breakfast at 07:30, during which we get to hang out with fellow Ambassadors, eat breakfast, and take a group photo before walking over to the opening keynotes together.
Fun fact: Dynatrace DevRel team members Andi Grabner, Henrik Rexed, Adam Gardner, and I are all CNCF Ambassadors!
The production level of the keynotes always blows my mind. Having been on the main stage at the Dynatrace Perform conference in February 2025, I had a taste of just how much time and effort goes into putting on a well-executed production. Mad respect to the folks behind the scenes who make all the magic happen.
I love that several of the keynotes this time around had a focus on observability, with talks from Honeycomb’s Christine Yen, eBay’s Vijay Samuel, and Dah0’s Kasper Borg Nissen. It’s been really cool to see how Observability has taken a bigger and bigger role in recent conferences. For example, this year’s Southern California Linux Expo (ScALE) had a dedicated observability track for the first time. KubeCon also has a dedicated observability track, and the Observability Day co-located event now has two tracks. Observability is definitely here to stay!
OpenTelemetry Observatory and Humans of OpenTelemetry interviews
The OpenTelemetry Observatory was back in the Solutions Showcase for a fourth time. I love the OTel Observatory because it provides a great space for OTel practitioners to connect with community members. Since KubeCon NA 2024, it has also included a display panel listing the top OTel individual contributors and contributing organizations. I spotted my own GitHub user handle, avillela, among the top individual contributors, along with Dynatrace as one of the top contributing organizations! So cool!
The OTel Observatory is also where we’ve conducted the Humans of OTel interviews since KubeCon Chicago in 2023. Shot over two days, fellow OTel End User SIG maintainer, Reese Lee, and I interviewed a number of OTel practitioners and contributors, including our very own Mikko Viitanen, who’s the product manager of our Dynatrace OTel team! Fellow Dynatrace DevRel Henrik Rexed lent us his filmmaking and production talents to help make this top-notch! I can’t wait to share the interviews once Henrik and I are done doing all of the editing in the next couple of weeks.
Humans of OpenTelemetry livestream
Last KubeCon (Salt Lake City 2024), we also introduced the Humans of OTel livestream, in which Reese Lee and I interview an end user and someone from OTel leadership. This time around, we interviewed Grafana’s Marylia Gutierrez (former end user and current OTel approver and maintainer) and Honeycomb.io’s Austin Parker (OTel Community Manager).
Marylia talked about her journey in going from end user in her former role at Cockroach Labs, to OTel approver and maintainer, in her current role at Grafana Labs. She also talked about the localization work she’s doing, helping to translate the OTel docs into Portuguese as part of a larger effort to make the OTel docs available in a variety of languages. Fun fact: the OTel docs are now available in English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, and Chinese!
Austin talked about OTel’s past, present, and future, and shared some of the latest and greatest project updates (more on that shortly).
OpenTelemetry Project Updates
I’ve tried to make a point of attending the OpenTelemetry (OTel) project updates since KubeCon EU 2023 in Amsterdam. I remember we were crammed into a small conference room. It was hot, stuffy, and people were overflowing into the hallway. This time around, there was a big room to match our big audience. Some highlights:
- Project growth:
- Contributions have seen a steady growth since the project’s inception in 2019
- The project has seen 1000+ contributions across different organizations (fun fact: Dynatrace has been one of the top contributors since the project’s early days)
- Graduation status:
- Graduation prerequisites have been fulfilled, so it’s only a matter of time before the project achieves graduated status with the CNCF. Who knows…maybe we’ll see an announcement at one of the upcoming KubeCons this year! 🤞
- Certification and education:
- The OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA) is in beta, and will be in GA (general availability) soon!
- Available for FREE: the Linux Foundation has a Getting Started with OpenTelemetry course
- Surveys:
- One of the End User SIG’s mandates is to share end user feedback with the various project SIGs. We’ve achieved this by partnering with project SIGs in the last year to help put out surveys to the OTel community. These help drive SIG roadmaps for the coming year. A huge thanks to the 551 responses that we’ve had across 6 surveys since March 2024.
- Other updates:
- The OTel Collector now supports profiling with the service.profileSupport feature gate, supported by 12 components!
- At the KubeCon NA OTel Project Updates, the team introduced an OpenTelemetry user-facing logs API. This API is now part of the OTel Specification. The Logs Bridge API will coexist with the Logs API.
- The OTel Collector has 43 new components, and a number of core modules have been marked as 1.x.
Main KubeCon EU 2025 talks
In addition to my Observability Day talk, I also gave not one, but TWO talks at the main conference.
How Green is My OpenTelemetry Collector?
My first talk on Wednesday, April 2nd, was called How Green is My OpenTelemetry Collector? In this talk, Nancy Chauhan and I explored using the CNCF’s Kepler project to tune the OTel Collector to lower its carbon footprint. We covered how to install Kepler and configure the OTel Collector to send telemetry data to an Observability backend and how to analyze the data emitted by Kepler to help you tune the OTel Collector to make it more energy-efficient. I used Dynatrace dashboards, powered by DQL, to help me analyze the data.
I met Nancy last year at KubeCon EU in Paris. As an active member of TAG Environmental Sustainability and founder of Women in Cloud Native, she was the perfect partner this talk! A huge thanks to everyone who attended. We were the last talk of the day, so I always appreciate it when people stick around that late. And a huge shout out to Henrik Rexed, who previously did a TON of work on Kepler, and whose help was instrumental in helping us put this talk together. You can check out some of his previous work on Kepler here.
OTel Me How to Get My Open Source Community Taken Seriously
My second talk took place on Thursday, April 3rd, and was called, OTel Me How to Get My Open Source Community Taken Seriously. This time, my co-speaker was Reese Lee. Our talk was about how we built out the OTel community via the OTel End User SIG. She and I are maintainers of the SIG, alongside Dan Gomez Blanco. Our talk highlighted the things that make the OTel community special, and how we keep that community going through the End User SIG. The End User SIG is responsible for connecting end users, which we do through our regular monthly sessions, OTel Me… and OTel in Practice.
We also help bring end user feedback to OTel maintainers, which we do by partnering with various project SIGs to administer surveys. They help drive the direction and roadmap for the various OTel SIGs, ensuring that they include features that benefit the end users.
As with Wednesday’s talk, this talk was near the end of the day, so again, I am super grateful for the folks who made it out. I was pleasantly surprised to see a number of OTel contributors attending the talk, which made my day!
Reese and I have spoken together several times over the past couple of years: at KubeCon, Open Source Summit, Observability Day, and All Things Open. She’s a wonderful talk partner because we think and work the same way. Also, her cat, Taco, makes THE BEST slide model.
Final thoughts on KubeCon EU 2025
After three talks in three days and three recording events, I was exhausted, but I had a blast. I come away from every KubeCon with an immense feeling of gratitude: for the opportunity to speak and share my knowledge, for being able to personally connect with members of the OTel community, and for getting to see many good friends from across the globe in a single place.
Got the post-KubeCon blues? Check out Dynatrace’s KubeCon recap livestream recording, featuring Henrik Rexed, Alexantra Oberaigner, and me.
I’ll be speaking again at KubeCon Japan in mid-June, so if you’re around for that conference, please come and say hello!
If you want to learn more about Dynatrace and OpenTelemetry, check out these resources.
- Dynatrace Loves OpenTelemetry
- How to send OpenTelemetry data to Dynatrace
- Check out our video series, “Dynatrace Can Do THAT with OpenTelemetry?” In it, my teammate Andi Grabner teaches me all sorts of cool things that Dynatrace can do with OpenTelemetry data ingested into Dynatrace via the OTel Collector.
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