INSIGHTS

Mastering Kubernetes Observability: Insights for 2024

With Kubernetes having emerged as a de facto standard of container orchestration,  enterprises face an escalating challenge: achieving full visibility into their dynamic, distributed systems. For example, “75% [of businesses] say they suffer issues affecting the running of their clusters, up from 66% in 2022”. As usage spreads across multi-cloud and hybrid on-prem infrastructure, observability has become a key concern when managing your Kubernetes environment.

At a high-level, we believe that 2024 will prove to be a formative year for Kubernetes adoption as it becomes more mature and formalised. Organisations are now coalescing around standardised architectures and best practices instead of ad hoc configurations. In other words, we’re rapidly leaving behind the makeshift, fragmented solutions of yore. So, as reliance on homegrown scripts and duct-tape decreases in favour of mature patterns, organisations should embrace these new standards.

With that in mind, several technologies are emerging as frontrunners in bringing complete Kubernetes visibility:

Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF)

eBPF allows non-intrusive data collection deep in Kubernetes environments. eBPF is revolutionary, in particular:

• It embeds custom probes within the kernel to capture incredibly granular metrics without workload disruption or code modification.

• Probes impose minimal overhead and are extremely lightweight. For example, Groundcover leverages eBPF to extract comprehensive low-level telemetry around container networking, resource usage, application traces, request flows, and more. 

Vendors like Sysdig, Splunk, and Groundcover are applying eBPF in this way to extract richer Kubernetes monitoring telemetry. Using eBPF like this is a recent development and has gained traction extremely quickly, so is almost certain to become ubiquitous in 2024.

Cloud Native observability tools

2024 will see the ascent of new, cloud-native observability tools that take judicious advantage of the cloud’s benefits. With Groundcover, the management plane is hosted in the cloud, meaning data is accessible regardless of the status of your clusters.

Furthermore, by aggregating multiple data sources, cloud-native observability tools are able to generate inferences that would not be possible from tools that have limited context windows. To put this another way, if you have a cloud-native tool that has visibility into the whole context of a request, such as Open Telemetry (see below), then it can correlate the whole set of signals it’s received that relate to this request flow. If an upstream app update starts causing latency in a downstream dependency, cloud-native tools can pinpoint the root cause by looking holistically at the entire distributed system. Legacy monitoring tools lack this contextual tracing across environments which limits their troubleshooting capabilities.

Open Telemetry (OTel)

An emerging standard that collects and correlates telemetry data from microservices to provide end-to-end visibility into applications.

• OTel simplifies distributed tracing which is needed to track requests across modern, ephemeral cloud architectures
• It does this by assigning trace IDs to requests to correlate events despite potential time drift issues
• This standardised data from OpenTelemetry allows applications to become more intelligent by feeding metrics into AI/ML models to enable adaptive behaviours.

The key role Open Telemetry is set to play in 2024 is in its native support within other tools. This year, we’re certain to see a greater degree of standardisation and correlation across data sources and apps. This way of actually adding and harmonising extra logs and metrics is now becoming known as instrumentation, and will play a key role in transforming observability as a whole.

As Kubernetes deployments scale in complexity across disparate environments, comprehensive observability will require an ensemble of enhanced instrumentation, developer integration, advanced analytics, and customisable presentation. Companies that navigate these trends will be poised to unlock Kubernetes’ full potential and thrive in 2024 and beyond.

At Megazone, we’re in a unique position to identify and tap into the trends in Kubernetes observability. This is essential for businesses who do not want to be left behind in the fast-evolving world of containerisation.

Contact us today to learn how MegazoneCloud can be your guide for your evolving cloud and Kubernetes strategy.

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