text stringlengths 0 1.8k |
|---|
**Oleg Nenashev:** And this is exactly where we can talk about OpenTelemetry and other open standards. Because if any system independently creates its own monitoring and observability, you basically get lost. So when we talk about modern cloud-native deployment, with Kubernetes, you usually build your CI or CD system f... |
\[08:11\] Similarly to why Jaeger was introduced for cloud-native applications, we need the same for CI/CD and automation in the cloud, because we also need to draw information from these tools on multiple levels. So it might be a CI server, it might an agent, it might be just a build tool like Maven... But we need all... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You said there something really interesting about you disagreeing that CI and CD should be separate systems... And I will want to come back to that. So that's really important; I've taken a mental note. But Cyrille, why do you think that OpenTelemetry is important for CI/CD systems? |
**Cyrille Le Clerc:** I will break down the point in two different themes. The first theme is, as you have said, there is a lot of visibility in being an end-to-end view of the execution of the CI and CD processes, where distributed traces is very valuable. We see that distributed traces is a very good data structure t... |
So here we see a lot of value in capturing this data on distributed traces, which is often associated with OpenTelemetry, and is very useful. Then what you said also that was very interesting for me is - you say "We want a unified view on CI and CD", and beyond this debate, is it different tools, is it the same tools? ... |
Then when you talked about OpenTelemetry - I think OpenTelemetry is a great solution. First, it does distributed traces well, in a way that is standardized, popular for people... And also, OpenTelemetry has the vision to provide unified semantic conventions, a common vocabulary to unify things together. And you said "I... |
\[12:13\] So I saw these two dimensions - collecting data, and also this culture of abstracting to provide a unified vision on top of different implementation details, in some ways. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So from the perspective of having a good CI/CD system, regardless whether it's one or multiple, which has a good OpenTelemetry integration, what would that look like from the moment you push some code? What is the perfect flow that you imagine that a system with good OpenTelemetry would have? |
**Oleg Nenashev:** First of all, the pipeline would include multiple tools in the chain. For example, you push the code, it reaches first whatever social coding system, let's say GitHub, or GitLab... Even on this level, there are some events happening. Firstly, the system needs to process your request, it might apply i... |
And at this level, it's also not the end, because then we invoke tools. Because nobody really build software in CI or CD systems; it's external tools, like Maven or Gradle doing that. You invoke them. So these tools are also complicated, and you also need to have visibility on this level. |
So basically, in the beginning of this pipeline we should go through all these levels of tools, and for each level, ideally, we need to have some data so that we can understand what happens, what are the crossblockers for example, what are the obstacles our system experiences... And it gets complicated even more when w... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So we understand when the pipeline starts, and what happens at the beginning. The middle is always a little bit hazy, so we can leave it like that, because it depends on what it needs to do. But I think that we all agree that when the pipeline ends, some artifact - maybe a production artifact - needs ... |
**Oleg Nenashev:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Now, I know that some teams like their pipeline to end with code actually being deployed into production. What do you think about that? Do you think that that should be the last step of the pipeline? Do you think about this differently? |
**Oleg Nenashev:** Well, it depends whether it's a CI or CD pipeline... Because in a CD pipeline we usually deploy as the last stage; in a CI pipeline, even if we deploy, the last stage is actually doing a lot of reporting and post-processing... Because it's not enough to deliver the software, we also need to do a lot ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What do you think, Cyrille? |
**Cyrille Le Clerc:** \[16:02\] I would like to come back to your question on what is the right way to instrument a pipeline. What we have discovered instrumenting Jenkins and Maven and Ansible is that instrumenting well your pipeline is a journey for the instrumentation people. We have to understand what are the right... |
For example, on Jenkins we had to iterate to capture the right spans to measure the time it was taken to allocate a build agent. Our initial instrumentation did not capture it well, so it was hard for CI/CD administrators to really narrow down their investigation to this specific phase and understand evolving across ti... |
Another thing that was important for us was to iterate on the right attributes we extract from the pipeline execution that we attach to the spans, so that you can get the right meaning of the data for your use case. We've seen that there is a troubleshooting use case, troubleshooting of your pipeline execution. So here... |
If you want to be able to use this pipeline execution data to do some cost accounting, then you need to attribute your pipeline execution to teams, so maybe it's to understand what has caused your pipeline -- we are improving this on Jenkins at the moment... To understand what caused the execution of the pipeline, to b... |
**Break:** \[18:25\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You mentioned, Cyrille, about calculating, or the spans being worked out incorrectly when it comes to job allocation and agents... And that was an interesting problem that I know that CI/CD administrators have. There are many other problems... So I'm wondering, how does OpenTelemetry help the CI/CD ad... |
**Cyrille Le Clerc:** So as continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines get more and more complicated, with more complex orchestration, not only getting source code and compiling it to create an artifact, but now also creating a Docker image, going through security scanners, triggering deployment in previe... |
Something interesting that we observed as well is that observability says I need to be able to slice and dice my data in any dimension. We saw when there is a CI/CD platform problem, you have to very quickly understand if this is a problem that is impacting just one team, one pipeline, maybe because the Docker image us... |
So we wanted to provide tools to help CI/CD administrators to be notified early of problems, and being able to zoom in/zoom out to understand if the problem is impacting just one, or everybody. |
Here it was a very good match with the problems that observability is solving at the moment with microservices architectures and all the investments that have been done on microservices architecture observability - automated anomaly detection through leveraging statistics, machine learning, high cardinalities and metri... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Can you think of one example, Oleg, for an administrator, that this tooling helps solve? |
**Oleg Nenashev:** So for the administrator, when we talk about modern a CI/CD system, it's basically a mesh of various asynchronous processes; all these processes are loosely connected, so even if you have one mainstream pipeline which delivers here, actually, if you start looking under the hood, you may notice that m... |
For example, there might be a provisioning of agents, if we talk about the original work for monitoring. And this agent provisioning doesn't have to be synchronous. Agents maybe share between different pipelines, and hence various outages and issues will also be impacting multiple pipelines. So being capable to trace t... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[24:06\] That's a good one. One thing that really got me in the past was caching in CI/CD systems. So when you have basically some dependencies which have been cached, and there's issues related to retrieving data from the cache, it's so difficult to even understand "Where does this fit into my pipel... |
And you're right, there's all these changes that happen in pipelines, and we don't know why they're broken. We just know it doesn't work. Well, that doesn't help me much... And good luck debugging systems that you don't even know exist. That's an interesting proposition... |
**Oleg Nenashev:** Right. But you have to introduce these systems, because caching is one of the most effective ways to reduce the costs of your pipeline. Even if you talk about things like single-shot agents, \[unintelligible 00:25:00.17\] etc, when it comes to real massive production pipelines, we tend to actually si... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. |
**Cyrille Le Clerc:** Something that I identified also working on this visibility of CI/CD pipeline is that we often talk about a divergence between dev and ops, dev changing things all the time to deliver new features, new business value, and ops wanting stability. We see that on the CI/CD platform we have the same ch... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's a great point, and it made me think of flaky tests. When everything is fine and the CI/CD system still fails, and you run it again and then it passes. So I think flaky tests, when it comes to code and developers, tend to be very problematic, especially for legacy codebases, especially for distr... |
**Cyrille Le Clerc:** So this is on our radar, to also add observability to unit test execution. There is already a solution for Go tests; it's written by Jaana Dogan, who works at AWS, where she has instrumented with OpenTelemetry Go tests. And we have the idea that it could also work on Java unit tests or any other l... |
And where I think OpenTelemetry is very powerful is that every large organization has its flaky test detector implemented in some ways. People tend to reinvent the wheel. And with OpenTelemetry, with the open nature of its format, then we have an opportunity to create the backbone of unit test results, going through Op... |
With this open source community nature, I imagine that an open source solution will grow in the community, and leverage the fact that OpenTelemetry has a very flexible architecture, a popular technology with OpenTelemetry itself, and streaming Kafka, Kinesis or Google PubSub. I see a lot of traction, and I expect the s... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[28:11\] So I'm sold... I definitely want OpenTelemetry in my CI/CD system. How do I get it, Oleg? What do I do? |
**Oleg Nenashev:** Well, in theory, any system should include OpenTelemetry or APIs out of the box. It doesn't happen at the moment because OpenTelemetry is still an emerging standard... But how I would foresee it - basically, any enterprise-grade CI/CD would include a number of OpenTelemetry collectors, so that you ca... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So what about today? What CI/CD tool can I use today that has this out of the box? |
**Oleg Nenashev:** Well, that's a good question, because actually almost none of the tools have them, zero |
**Cyrille Le Clerc:** There are two CI platforms I am aware of who provide native OpenTelemetry instrumentation, and they are Jenkins, I am of course for integration, and also Concourse CI. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What do you need to do to get OpenTelemetry in Jenkins? |
**Cyrille Le Clerc:** So you just need to install the Jenkins OpenTelemetry plugin, going through your Jenkins plugins manager. And then once Jenkins is instrumented with OpenTelemetry, you have to connect your Jenkins to an OpenTelemetry endpoint backend, which can be maybe Elastic (I work for Elastic), or maybe you c... |
In Jenkins, with this OpenTelemetry integration we have started with traces initially, to trace pipeline execution. We have also captured health metrics. So you can also leverage our Jenkins OpenTelemetry integration to capture the health metrics of your Jenkins CI platform, route them to maybe Prometheus, or maybe an ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And what about Otel CLI from Equinix Labs? How could we use that to get some OpenTelemetry in CI/CD systems that maybe don't support it? |
**Oleg Nenashev:** It's possible. |
**Cyrille Le Clerc:** That's a great point. There were two initiatives that come to my mind. I think the first one I saw came from Honeycomb, where they created a small CLI to instrument some CI platform where the platform itself didn't instrument with Otel... Otherwise, if you are on GitHub Actions, for example, or ma... |
Also, even when you are inside Jenkins, inside a CI platform that is instrumented with Otel traces, it's still very interesting to get more granularity in let's say a makefile, because... You discuss a lot of makefiles in Ship It. If you want granularity on what's happening in your makefile, you can in your makefile wr... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.