May is all about SERVICES: Service Meshes and the Open Service Broker.

First Talk: Observability and the Depths of Debugging Cloud Native Applications Using Linkerd and Conduit
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Speaker: Franziska von der Goltz, engineer on Linkerd for Buoyant.io

Observability and monitoring are different, but complementary, needs for production applications. While monitoring focuses on measuring the overall health of your systems, observability aims to provide granular metrics that describe the behavior of your systems along with their context. Due to both its architecture and focus on providing observability, the service mesh can be a powerful debugging solution when trying to figure out what went wrong with your cloud native applications.

In this talk, Franziska shows you how to debug your Kubernetes applications using features of a service mesh in tandem with use of other CNCF projects like OpenTracing. She compares and contrast two different debugging techniques using both Linkerd and Conduit. After attending this talk, you’ll be able to use either approach to debug your Kubernetes-based applications.

Second Talk: Stateful is Hard: Hooking Apps up to Managed DBs
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Speaker: Aaron Schlesinger of the Microsoft Azure Containers group

Kubernetes lets us write crazy-powerful apps these days, and all three clouds will host it for you in some shape or form now. The result is that our apps are mostly portable, but there's more work to do in this space.

Databases are hard to maintain if you run them in Kubernetes. Same with pub/sub systems, or any combination of stateful and data really. Sometimes we just want to hook our apps up to the cloud equivalents of these things, so we don't have to manage them. How do we do _that_ in a portable way? Enter the Open Service Broker (OSB) API and Kubernetes Service Catalog.

Learn how to connect your apps to all your favorite cloud services without ever opening the portal or using the CLI. It's the same OSB API for all the clouds, and the same Kubernetes Service Catalog resources for any cluster. We're getting to a place where you can get the services you need without caring what cloud your app runs on.