Adriana Villela’s Observability Odyssey at KubeCon Paris 2024

This is Textron tv. Hey everybody. Welcome back.

We are back from our lunch break here at KubeCon with more fantastic guests. It's, uh, kinda like friends, family and acquaintances and colleagues and new friends that we've met. But here's a, uh, uh, old friend.

She's not old, but it's, she's an old friend, Adriana Ella, who is senior staff developer advocate. There you go. I know.

That's a mouthful. That's quite the, a lot of syllables. You need an acronym.

You need an acronym for it With the ServiceNow. Yeah. You need an acronym.

One more acronym. Hey. Right.

What? That can't hurt. Right?

It's good to have you. I mean, you are regular on lots of things. Uh, DevOps and bound and panels we do on anytime it's about SRE or platform engineering.

Observability operation. It's Maja culture. You know, the, the number of things that you talk about on our, on our shows and our panels is just cover so many Aries and it comes from your background.

Yeah. It comes from Your experience. You're not just kind of learn the features on the product and I can talk about it, right?

Yeah. Yeah. You've lived it and The blood, sweat, and tears with Blood, sweat and tears.

Maybe more tears sometimes. Yeah. Some days.

Some days. Some of those. Yeah.

The toil is real, right? Yeah. Exactly.

Well, let's love to have you, um, share, share your journey. Talk about your journey of where you've gone. Oftentimes, I think about you in the SRE vein Yeah.

Yeah. Of things. But you're, you're, you're much more, um, you know, deeper, wider than that in terms of your expertise.

Yeah. I mean, because I started off my career in, uh, software engineering. So I was a Java developer for like 15, 16 years.

Really? That long. I didn't realize That.

Yeah. Yeah. I know, I know.

And, and it's funny 'cause like Java, I, I don't love Java anymore. 'cause ever since I learned Python, I'm like, ah, that's way too. Yeah, No, I'm, I'm with you there.

I used to do a lot of Java, but now it's all Python. Yeah. It's way more fun.

So, yeah. And, and then I got into a job where I, I actually took a break. Um, I decided I wanted to quit tech.

So I was working at a bank for five years at this point. And I'm like, I'm kind of done with tech. I wanna be a professional photographer.

Oh, I quit for a year to run my own business. Mm-Hmm. And I learned so much from that because like, I am a shy person and it's really hard for me to come up to people and talk to them.

And I had to get out of that mindset as a professional photographer trying to put my business out there so that people, you know, knew I existed. So I had to develop, you know, those social skills. I had to, like, I put out a newsletter, I wrote blog posts, like managed my own website.

I ran the business by myself and I took the photos of course. Mm-Hmm. Um, and I call it the best worst year of my life.

Mm. Because, um, I realized at the end of the year, like, yeah, I could keep it up and perhaps, you know, I'll start making money 'cause I wasn't at the time. And I like restructured, you know, like, I think I have a real appreciation, like for new vendors.

'cause they're like, how do we price things? That was so difficult for me as a photographer. Like, how do I price my packages where people, you know, appreciate the work that I put in, but they're not like, oh my God, this is ridiculous.

Right. So I could have continued down that vein, but I realized, you know, that's not what I really love. I love the tech side of things.

So I decided, you know what, this was great. It was a cleanse. I came back into tech, like super refreshed.

And then I got into the DevOps space kind of by accident, because when I came back I was managing like an upgrade for a vendor product. And everything that could go wrong did go wrong. And then I Remember, especially happens on most software projects, but Okay.

Right. I mean, that's how we learn. And my dad, who's also in tech, he's, oh my God, he's like a software architect.

He learned rust for fun last year. So Yeah. Wasn't he lazy?

Like Boeing or some, uh, He worked for government Manufac Accenture for a really long time. Okay. And then he worked on the Obamacare.

Um, that's what he did. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. For, yeah. Yeah.

So when, when they came back to save it. Yeah. The come, I think it was Accenture Went Back Picture.

So he was the saving side. Yeah. Yeah.

So, um, yeah. And he's like, you know, you should check out this DevOps thing. I'm like, what?

And What every father says to his, his daughter. Right. You know, check out DevOps.

Yeah. So I started, like, I started poking around and I'm like, this magical thing is gonna make my life better. And, and then I, it happened that the bank that I was, that I quit and that I returned to, um, a year later, they were like standing up a DevOps practice.

And so they brought me in as a, as a DevOps coach. And I actually ended up becoming, like, I ended up managing, uh, the team that was basically, um, bringing the transformation to the bank, to the entire bank. So we had to talk to everybody, get them excited.

So those skills on the, on the blogging and the newsletters and all that stuff, like, it was internal evangelism and running interfacing with customers people. Exactly. And we can be introverts.

I'm an introvert too. Exactly. But you know, you can still have really enjoy interfacing with people and talking with people.

Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, that's how I got my foot into the DevOps world and, you know, started to, you know, managing like large, uh, enterprise initiatives.

So I've seen, I've seen what works, what doesn't work. I mean, what we see in a lot of large enterprises is that they're constantly changing. Right.

To the point where you get transformation fatigue. So what we had to do was go in and like, yeah, I know we've, you've seen so many different transformations over the course of the Years. We used to say, this too shall pass.

This Too shall pass. Right. One of the enterprises I was in, like, exactly.

Just Hang on. And sort of the, kind of undermines it by doing that. Well, That's the thing, right?

Because everyone is so sick and tired of it. And so I was trying to like really get people excited. 'cause I, I believed in DevOps so much that I'm like, no, no, this thing is totally, totally worth it.

You have gotta listen to me. So I think that, you know, enthusiasm kind of got people like, oh, this sounds awesome. So yeah, I mean that's how I got onto that, onto that path.

And, And where did sort of the observability, SRE those things start to fit in? So After I left my bank job in 2020, I decided I don't wanna manage people anymore. I just wanna be an individual contributor.

And I, uh, ended up working on a release engineering team for a bit. And that's where I like picked up. I'd say most of my Kubernetes skills, like I, I knew some Kubernetes before, 'cause we were using OpenShift, but I, I feel like it, it, it kind of obscure some of like the more fundamental Kubernetes things, which I think I appreciated after the fact.

I'm like, oh, OpenShift made so many things, like, so much easier. 'cause it, you realize, realize what a Difference. Okay, Interesting.

So, but then I got really deep into Kubernetes Argo cd and I started like blogging about my experiences and so on medium. And then like people started reading my blog and, and then, um, I ended up at two cows. I don't know if you remember two cows where Oh yeah.

Very, very much. So from the days of your where Yeah. Days of your, seems like a long time.

It wasn't that long ago Actually. I know, I know. I remember downloading their stuff for free.

I'm like, Hey, free Windows software, right? Mm-Hmm. So I, at the, at that time, they were, uh, doing mostly like domain, like they were, um, domain wholesaler, but they also had a division, uh, for like sim card provisioning.

So they were launching that and they hired me, um, to basically manage an observability team and a platform engineering team. Um, the platform engineering team was Hashi Corp Nomad zero experience. But I had my Kubernetes experience, you know, as, as my foundational experience.

And then the observability stuff, I had read a little bit about it, um, when I was doing the release engineering work, but not enough. And I'm like, if I'm gonna lead a team, I'd better make sure I level up. So again, it's like researching on, you know, nomad, researching on observability.

I got, you know, I started, I got into like charities, tweets, and I'm like, oh my God, this is like wonderful. And started following like Liz Fine Jones on Twitter as well. And, and then I another Amazing person too.

Oh my God. So amazing. Love Liz.

And you know, I caught their eye also and they started like retweeting my stuff and I'm like, oh my God. Like this is the most wonderful thing in the world. Like, these people that I look up to or like retweeting my Stuff, isn't that, isn't that cool?

That what a cool, what a great feeling. So cool. So yeah.

And then, and then I got to my current job because my former boss, uh, saw one of my tweets, like just linking to one of my blog posts exploring observability. And I think it was like a rage post where I'm like, these are not the things you do. And, and so he's like, how would you like to do this for a living?

I'm like, would I, Well, you can see the thread, you can see how so many things you did really equipped you for the next thing Exactly. Equipped You to be where you are. Did you have a technical background before you went into software development with Java?

I, or is that kind of, you know, a lot of people just kind of happen into it or 'cause of Interest? Yeah. Yeah.

That's a good question. I did because like my dad got me programming at h time. I was wondering About that.

Yeah. Yeah. We had like this old 3 86, it ran CBA with the Gorilla game.

Do you remember the gorilla game? I thought you were saying it like a deck vax in the basement or something, you know. No, no.

A really old Computer. Yeah. So that's Cool.

Well that's that. I mean, what a great difference that makes too for you because she got dad family there helping you tutoring where you need it and Exactly. It also brings the, you know, dad, leave me alone.

I need, I, let me show you. I can do it. I Don't need you.

But, you know, anyway. But you, you know, my, my educational background was not in software engineering. I actually, I wanted to build rockets.

I wanna build spaceships. I love Star Trek. And I was like, I would love to build a space ship.

So I wanted to be an aerospace engineer. And then I ended up with an industrial engineering degree and they had an information engineering option at my school. So we actually took like, um, some compsci courses, like, you know, algorithms.

I even took a, a microprocessors course and learned assembly language. Um, so it was like always kind of there in the background. And so I had like some of the, I had the fundamentals, which was cool.

Yeah. A lot of building blocks that you Yeah. Yeah.

Had with both the experience prior as well in school. Yeah. I read an article the other day.

It was talking about, um, computer science students, the, all the variations, you know? Yeah. MIS degree, all that kind of stuff.

Um, in the last decade it's doubled the number of students that are taking those kind of classes. It just shows you how much of our job. Yeah.

You don't have to be a full-time Java programmer or a full-time microservices developer or whatever, Kubernetes. But having that skill, you know, like you did, equips you to do a lot of different things. Yeah, Yeah.

Absolutely. And you Understand how it works, kind of, it's, yeah. I don't need to be able to fix my car, but just kind of knowing a little bit more about how it works Exactly.

Helps You know how to, you know, how to take care of it and Exactly. I think one of the most valuable things, no matter where you are, whether, you know, you go to like go get a post-secondary degree or whatever is, I think for our industry to stay current, you have to be really good at learning things quickly, right? Mm-Hmm.

And I think like it, and if you can't, it's really hard to keep up, right? Because we have to like know enough to be dangerous so we can do the thing. Right.

So I, I think that, like if anyone asks me what's your superpower? That is my superpower. I agree.

Because it's like, without it, like I, I had two talks for CubeCon, one for Observability day and one today. And we, my, my talk partner and I put these talks together in the span of a month learning stuff that we'd never known before. Mm-Hmm.

Um, and it's, you know, it's, I think we learning, I think because of that background and the just in time learning Right. Being able to pick stuff up fast Yeah. And talk about it.

My, One of my, uh, software professors in college, uh, he said, he said one day, I think it was a junior, and he said, now just keep in mind 'cause we're like the advanced courses, just keep in mind everything you learn here is gonna be outta date in six months. Exactly. Matter of fact, it probably already is like, really?

But which is intriguing to me. 'cause like, well, what's, what it, what's happening? I want to go find out my boy.

And that's that thirst for learning and that joy. Yeah. Yeah.

That really helps you propel your Career. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, the people who end up stuck in their careers are the ones who are like refusing to learn the new things.

And, you know, that might work for a bit, but then things are moving without them. Mm-Hmm. And, and then what Kenny do you wanna stay there and specialize in?

Yeah, that's okay. You know? Yeah.

And other folks are like to be more leading edge, sometimes bleeding edge too. Yeah, absolutely. If you were gonna take, make any course corrections or do something a little differently in your path, is there any things you'd like, oh, I would've liked to have done that.

Or, I went down this for a while and that turned out not to be such a good idea. Anything you would do differently? I don't think so.

There are, you know, I, I think when I reflect on my career, I think everything that I did kind of led me to that. Like, I had at one point an opportunity to leave, you know, a bad situation, um, for, for another job. And I stuck it at that bad job for a while.

Um, and I could have gone to a place that seemed like, you know, welcoming and good pay and all that. And I stayed there because of the team. Now I, so for me, like even though I regretted leaving later than I should have, two things came out of it.

If I hadn't taken that path, I wouldn't be where I am now. But I also learned that you don't, as much as you love working with certain people, you don't stay there just because of the team, because you also have to have professional fulfillment. Yes.

Yeah. I Agree. So whenever, you know, like when I was a manager and I'd have people leave my team who were really good, you know, it's sad to see them leave, but the best thing you can do is like, wish them luck and hope that, you know, you cross paths again.

Maybe there's gonna be some good karma headed your way at some point. Point. Yeah.

Hope they do a great thing. Yeah, exactly. Maybe in small part 'cause something you might have influenced or they learned or got to do.

Exactly. They were working together with You. Exactly.

So yeah, no regrets. You know, I have very similar thinking about those things, so No wonder I like having you so much as a guest, one of the reasons, but how have things changed? I mean, you think about CNCF and, uh, Kubernetes and we, we were so focused on Kubernetes as part of cloud native.

Yeah. A lot of this came about. And now, I mean, it, it is a kind of cloud wide and it's, it is not generic.

It's still very focused on cloud computing and cloud native and a lot of the aspects of it. But this is a much bigger community than it was even five, 10 years ago. Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

It's so wild. I mean, like, I wasn't, I came from a background of like very enterprise EE stuff. We like open source, uh, we don't touch that.

We need like a support model, right? So in my last few jobs where like this more embrace for cloud native and open source, it's been like really I opening because like for one thing, first of all, I thought this stuff was like scary hard. And then I'm like, oh, it's just code telling you to like provision infrastructure.

I can deal with that, deal with that. And then, um, you know, just learning the new technology, it's, it's not been that bad. Uh, but also, like, you know, in my current job, it was the first time it contributed to open source and I thought, oh my God.

Like I've been coding forever. But I, I am so scared of contributing to open source. Right?

Because when you do that, you have to put yourself out there. You are being vulnerable in front of all those approvers. It's your work and In front of Hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe more of people.

Right, Exactly. And it's so terrifying. 'cause it's like, well, what if they think I'm an idiot?

Right. And you know, I, most of my work is around open telemetry and I've been so lucky that the Open Telemetry community is so, so nice. So, you know, whenever I have like submit a pull request and they, they have like a comment, but it's like the nicest way to like basically say, oh, you know, it's not quite this, it's that, you know, you might wanna clarify.

So it makes it less scary to continue It helping you as opposed to, you know, telling you did something wrong. Yeah. Yeah.

It's, you know, it's kind, it's the opposite of those like really awful trolley posts on Stack Overflow when someone's like, you didn't read the manual. And I'm like, the trolls. Okay.

Okay. Yeah. That's that's funny.

Yeah. I really wanna go out there and comment after that. Right.

Yeah, right. One of those that means like, thanks, I'll never ask a question again. Yeah, Exactly.

So yeah. Um, It, it's so interesting. Things have changed, you know, obviously I'm a lot older when I, when I came up with school, you know, you really learn something and learned it deeply and before you go out and try things.

And I, I kind of had an aha moment one time I was interviewing people about a new product and somebody mentioned that they had poured their patio in their backyard. And I'm like, oh really? Have you done that work before?

No, I'd never done that before. Really? How did you decide you could do that?

He said, well, I watched a video on YouTube and it was only two and a half minutes. I figured you can learn in two and a half minutes. You could, I could do that.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a different metric than I, I grew up with.

Oh my God. Yeah. Fantastic.

You know, I know what, what an enabling way to kind of think about it. It's so true because I, I think, I think it shows you that a lot of these things that you think are completely scary really aren't, it's just the way in which they're presented. Which for me, like that's my mission when I, when I try to teach other people as well, because, you know, one of my pet pee peeves is I'm trying to learn something new and the documentation is sparse.

Or like, you know, the people who who are working on it are so in the weeds that of course they understand it, but they're not looking at it from my perspective. Right. Right.

So I really like my technical blog posts are excruciatingly detailed to the point where it's like a 15 minute read. But I will give you all of the steps. Right.

Because I, I don't want you to go through the thing that I went through Mm-Hmm. So, you know, I, I try to do that, but I'm also trying to get into the personal habit of like, yeah, I'll write the blog post 'cause it feels, feels nice doing that. But I also wanna contribute back to the original docs way to share.

Right. Yeah. Because that should be our, our, our source of, of knowledge, our source of truth, right.

For these things. So, Well, anything, um, coming up next at, uh, at the conference you're looking forward to, do you have a talk coming up or I've got a talk this afternoon. You do At, at four 30 on the observability track.

We dig into an aspect of the o hotel operators, uh, target allocator component for Prometheus. People who are, uh, looking to collect Prometheus, inges Prometheus metrics using Oel. So a lot Of, a lot of Prometheus as well as hotel users.

Of Course. Yeah. Yeah.

I Can imagine. It's gonna be a pretty popular topic. Yeah.

Have you written a blog post about it yet? We Have, yeah. We got into the habit of like, we blog and write the talk.

You live, you say you live. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely for you.

Yeah. So it'll be coming out. Hotel blog.

You're doing podcasting too, right? I do. I have a podcast that I run with my daughter, it's called Geeking Out and she does the editing and she designed the logo on the T-shirt.

Very cool. And the sticker on my mask. Ah, very cool.

And yeah, we just have like geeky conversations with various people. Um, last year I got Kelsey Char to come on who I met at CubeCon during his book signing. He saw the sticker on my mask and he's like, what's that?

I'm like, it's my podcast. He's like, I do podcasts, I can come on your podcast. I'm Like, okay.

Made my ear. Yeah. And I had charity majors on as well early in the year, so Oh, charity's fantastic.

I've had some really cool guests and I like to get, you know, like the high profile but also like, you know, the folks that nobody knows but have like really cool things to say. But they're good, good work. They are.

Yeah. Yeah. So where can folks find out about your podcast?

Where can they check out your blog? Yeah, so I have a blog on Medium, it's called Adri. com.

That's where you can find my blog. me/geeking out and it'll link to all of my socials. Well, fantastic.

So you can follow it there. Keep up the good work and congratulations to uh, you know, thanks to ServiceNow for supporting your, you and people like you and the company that are not just pushing product out the door. Yeah.

You're doing that helping customers and business, but you're also doing, and while you're helping the community too, so that's nice to be in that environment. Yeah. That's appreciated.

So. Absolutely. Well thank you so much for having me.

Appreciate It. It's always a pleasure when we look forward to the next time. I don't know if you're scheduled, but I'm sure you will be within the next week or two now that we've talked.

So Awesome. Sounds good. Jodi will be reaching out.

Yay. Our production, our, uh, executive producer. Love It.

Love it. Schedules, uh, all of Our time. Always down for it.

Always down for It. Good deal. Well have a good rest of the conference.

Thank you. Pleasure seeing you in person. Yeah, nice to see you too, Mitch.

All right. Adriana v Ella, Ella, thank you very much. Um, I only entered say It every other time we were on a panel, so I should know it well.

But Adriana's been, uh, fantastic. Cheryl, what a great journey. And if you're kind of thinking about your career and where you are, there's a lot of great lessons learned that um, maybe even if you took a funny path, you're not sure if that was helpful.

I'll bet it will be many examples where that was that way for Adriana. So stay tuned. We have other fantastic guests just like Adriana coming up and we'll be uh, talking with you a few, so don't go away.

We'll be right back. I.