Dotan Horovits
Developer Advocate, DevOps Specialist, Open Source Evangelist
Tel Aviv, Israel
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Horovits lives at the intersection of technology, product and innovation. With over 20 years in the hi-tech industry as a software developer, a solutions architect and a product manager, he brings a wealth of knowledge in cloud and cloud-native solutions, DevOps practices and more.
Horovits is an international speaker and thought leader, as well as an Ambassador of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). He runs the successful OpenObservability Talks podcast, where he evangelizes on Observability in IT systems using popular open source projects such as Prometheus, OpenSearch, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry.
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Area of Expertise
Vector Search Made Simple: Getting Started with OpenSearch for AI Applications
OpenSearch, a Linux Foundation open source project, has evolved from search to a powerful vector database solution. This talk will begin by explaining the transition from traditional lexical search to vector-based similarity search, and how OpenSearch combines both approaches in one complete package.
The session introduces fundamental concepts of vector databases, including how they store and process embedded meanings of various data types (text, images, and audio) using k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) functionality.
We'll explore practical applications such as visual search, semantic search, and recommendation engines, with emphasis on real-world use cases. This is your opportunity to learn how OpenSearch can serve as a knowledge base for AI systems, particularly in applications like retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with large language models.
Standardizing CI/CD Observability: Insights from the OpenTelemetry CI/CD SIG
We all know that observability is a must-have for operating systems in production. But we often neglect our own backyard - our software release process. As a result, we also lack standardization, and each CI/CD tool invent its own way of reporting about pipeline runs, which causes fragmentation, lock-in and difficulty to leverage existing observability tools.
We've been talking about the need for a common "language" for reporting and observing CI/CD pipelines for years, and finally, we see the first "words" of this language entering the "dictionary" of observability - the OpenTelemetry open specification and semantic conventions. On this talk the OTel CI/CD SIG lead will share the need, and the work of the SIG.
Join us to learn about this new SIG, its role, the milestones achieved and roadmap ahead. The talk will also discuss the alignment with adjacent open source communities such as the CDF's Jenkins and CDEvents and the Eiffel community.
Platform Engineering: DevOps Evolution or a Fancy Rename?
Everyone’s talking about Platform Engineering these days. Even Gartner featured it in its Hype Cycle for Software Engineering. But what is Platform Engineering really about? Is it the next stage in the evolution of DevOps? Is it just a fancy rebrand for DevOps or SRE? And most importantly - do I need it?
In this talk Horovits will look into the accumulated experience of larger organizations, the common pains that drive them to adopt Platform Engineering, and what DevOps responsibilities it covers. The talk will also share insights from the recent whitepaper published by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s TAG App Delivery.
Horovits will also provide guidance on which organizations should adopt Platform Engineering and at which point in their DevOps maturity lifecycle. This talk will equip you with the fundamentals to assess Platform Engineering for your organization.
OpenSearch: The Open Source Path to Search and Observability
OpenSearch has become a cornerstone of open source search and observability, empowering developers and organizations to derive meaningful insights from unstructured data at scale. The past year marks a significant milestone in its journey, with OpenSearch officially joining The Linux Foundation, further cementing its position in the open source ecosystem.
In this session we’ll introduce OpenSearch, from indexing and analyzing unstructured logs to full observability capabilities across tracing, monitoring and security. We’ll share latest improvements in query performance and scalability, and real-time analytics, as well as its expanding ecosystem with new plugins and SDKs in multiple programming languages, and its compatibility with cloud-native environments. You’ll even find vector search and natural language processing capabilities for your AI/ML development.
Join us to hear it right from the Chief Evangelist of the open source project and discover how OpenSearch can fit into your observability architecture.
OpenDevRel: Tales of Developer Relations in Open Source
We all know DevRel (Developer Relations): our company brings a novel approach to the industry, a new and better way of doing things, and we need someone to evangelize this concept, this approach, and then our product. But what if your company has an open source play? Clearly DevRel has a major stake in that, but how exactly does it work?
In this talk, Horovits will share his DevRel experience around OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, OpenSearch and other prominent projects. Bringing his rich experience from the vendor side, the dev community leader side, and the open source foundation side as a CNCF Ambassador (the Cloud Native Computing Foundation), Horovits will offer some best practices and guidelines running an effective DevRel program for open source.
Whether you found your own open source project, or whether there’s an established OSS project your company wishes to get involved in, this talk will give you fruit for thought.
Navigating the Open Source Observability Landscape
In the cloud native era systems are getting ever more dynamic and complex. With containers and microservices architecture, monitoring and troubleshooting systems is more challenging than ever before.
The open source community has risen up to the challenge and has delivered solutions that fit modern environments. Established open source projects such as Prometheus and the ELK Stack have gathered massive adoption, while new projects keep emerging and uncovering yet untapped possibilities such as continuous profiling and eBPF. Alongside tools, open standards, such as OpenMetrics and OpenTelemetry, are emerging to converge the industry and prevent vendor lock-in. Goodness, it’s hard to keep track of all that goodness.
In this talk CNCF Ambassador and open observability pundit Dotan Horovits will talk about the recommended open source tools and standards for observability, and how to combine them to help you achieve effective observability in your environment.
From Observability to APM: Taking Cloud Native Up The Stack
Observability is often seen as the new monitoring frontier, but does it truly surpass the traditional APM in microservices performance tracking? The cloud-native observability stack, until recently, focused on tracing individual requests and searching application logs—a far cry from the holistic view provided by APM tools in the monolithic era.
This talk bridges the gap between Observability and APM, dissecting key differences and exploring how initiatives within OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, and CNCF stack address these gaps. Horovits delves into Span Metrics, client-side telemetry, and beyond, sharing insights from open-source projects, vendor perspectives, and the end-user community.
Join this multifaceted discussion to navigate uncharted territory, ponder the necessity of APM's scope in this evolving landscape, and contemplate the evolving roles of vendors in this updated stack. It's an invitation to ignite an open dialogue on propelling the CNCF observability stack - up the stack.
From Fork to Foundation: The OpenSearch Journey to the Linux Foundation
Building and managing a successful open source project is no small feat, especially when it begins as a fork born out of the need to preserve openness. OpenSearch started as a response to the relicensing of Elasticsearch and Kibana, and over the years, it has grown into a vibrant, community-driven ecosystem. This year’s milestone of joining The Linux Foundation highlights the project’s commitment to open governance, collaboration, and long-term sustainability.
In this session, we’ll share the lessons learned from OpenSearch’s journey, exploring the strategies behind building a healthy, scalable, and inclusive open source community. From establishing clear governance models to fostering innovation with features like vector search and AI-powered capabilities, we’ll provide actionable insights for maintaining momentum and trust in open source projects.
Whether you’re starting a new open source initiative or managing an existing one, this talk offers a practical guide to navigating challenges, ensuring community alignment, and achieving long-term impact—just as OpenSearch has done.
Distributed Tracing in Java? OpenTelemetry to the Rescue!
Distributed tracing is hot these days. It’s your way to understand how requests flow through your microservices and pinpoint where errors occur and where latency is coming from. OpenTelemetry is fast becoming the standard way to instrument applications and collect traces and other telemetry data from systems.
On this talk we’ll see how easy it is to instrument Java apps using OpenTelemetry. We’ll see automatic instrumentation as well as manual instrumentation approaches, and discuss available integration with popular libraries, frameworks and application servers.
Horovits is the author of the Guide to OpenTelemetry and is an avid speaker on the project as well as on open source and observability in general. Join the session to start your journey into distributed tracing on the right foot.
Fighting Slow and Flaky CI/CD Pipelines? You Need Observability
We all know that observability is a must-have for operating systems in production. But we often neglect our own backyard - our software release process. That was our mistake, which led us to wasting time and energy in handling failures in the CI/CD pipeline, and made our Developer-on-Duty (DoD) shifts tedious.
On this talk I’d like to share how we built effective observability into our CI/CD pipeline using intelligent data collection, dashboarding and alerting, to boost our response to failures and improve our quality of life on the way.
This talk will give practical guidance on how to improve observability into your CI/CD pipeline. Whether you use Jenkins like we do, or other CI/CD tools, you’ll learn how to augment them and reach higher productivity.
OpenTelemetry: the Open Source Vision for Unified Observability
Everyone wants observability into their system, but find themselves with too many vendors and tools, each with its own API, SDK, agents and collectors.
In this talk Horovits will present OpenTelemetry, an ambitious open source project with the promise of a unified framework for collecting observability data. With OpenTelemetry you could instrument your application in a vendor-agnostic way, and then analyze the telemetry data in your backend tool of choice, whether Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, or others.
Horovits will cover the current state of the various projects comprising OpenTelemetry (across programming languages, exporters, receivers, protocols and more), some of which are not even GA yet, and provide practical guidance on how to get started with OpenTelemetry in your own system.
Cracking Performance Issues with Distributed Tracing
The dynamic and highly distributed nature of modern systems renders it impossible to keep track of the web of interconnecting services and of the flow of requests through that web. Distributed tracing provides the missing telemetry to understand the service dependencies in a microservice (or any highly distributed) system and identify critical paths and latency sources in the application.
Distributed tracing has been gaining a lot of attention, with 38% percent increase in DevOps using it year over year. The leading tool in that space is Jaeger, the popular open source project which was developed at Uber, and is now a graduated project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
This talk will equip you with the essentials of distributed tracing. Then through live demo on Jaeger you will learn how to practically use it to monitor your microservices architecture.
Beyond Logs, Metrics and Traces. The Data Analytics Paradigm Shift in Observability
We all know logs, metrics and traces, the “three pillars of observability”. We’ve been told that by collecting them we’d gain observability into our systems, right? WRONG!
Observability is NOT logs+metrics+traces. You can diligently collect these signals and still find yourself without the required observability to detect and root-cause during a major outage or incident. We need a paradigm shift. Observability is actually a data analytics problem.
In this inspiring and thought provoking talk, Horovits will introduce the data analytics approach, together with practical measures that will guide you in gaining real observability into your system and in getting the insights you need, when you need them. Horovits will also challenge the “holy pillar trinity” and look into additional observability data you may not have considered, and other conventions you've grown used to.
The State of OpenTelemetry
Everyone wants observability into their system, but find themselves with too many vendors and tools, each with its own API, SDK, agent and collectors.
In this talk I will present OpenTelemetry, an ambitious open source project with the promise of a unified framework for collecting observability data. With OpenTelemetry you could instrument your application in a vendor-agnostic way, and then analyze the telemetry data in your backend tool of choice, whether Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, or others.
I will cover the current state of the various projects of OpenTelemetry (across programming languages, exporters, receivers, protocols), some of which not even GA yet, and provide useful guidance on how to get started with it.
Relicensing: When Your Open Source Tool Turns to the Dark Side
Imagine waking up one morning to find out that your beloved open source database, which lies at the heart of your system, is being relicensed: it's no longer Apache 2.0 but another OSS license or even a non-OSS license.
What does that mean? Can you still use it as before? Could the new license be infectious and require you to open source your own business logic?
This doom’s day scenario isn’t hypothetical. In fact we faced that twice over the past year alone. On this talk I will share his lessons learned with practical tips. If you’re using OSS, or if you’re in the process of evaluating a new OSS, you won't want to miss this talk.
The State of DevOps and Observability
What are your challenges with Kubernetes? How long does troubleshooting take? Which tools do you use? Who handles monitoring and observability? How do you handle WFH?
Now’s your chance to get perspectives from over 1000 engineers across the globe, and check out the pulse of DevOps.
Open Source for Better Observability
In the cloud native era systems are getting ever more dynamic and complex. With containers and microservices architecture, monitoring, understanding and troubleshooting systems is challenging than ever before. The open source community has risen up to the challenge and delivered solutions that fit modern environment. Open source solutions such as Kubernetes, Prometheus and the ELK stack have gathered massive adoption with developers and DevOps engineers, who also carry this skillset between companies and grow the adoption.
In this talk I will talk about observability and recommended open source tools to help you achieve it in your environment.
Monitoring Microservices The Right Way
Modern systems today are far more complex to monitor.
Microservices combined with containerized deployment results in highly dynamic systems with many moving parts across multiple layers.
These systems emit massive amounts of highly dimensional telemetry data from hardware and the operating system, through Docker and Kubernetes, all the way to application and its databases, web proxies and other frameworks.
Many have come to realize that the commonly prescribed Graphite+StatsD monitoring stack is no longer sufficient to cover their backs.
New requirements need to be considered when choosing a monitoring solution for the job, including scalability, query flexibility and metrics collection.
In this talk Horovits will look at the characteristics of modern systems and what to look for in a good monitoring system. He will also discuss the common open source tools, from the days of Graphite and StatsD to the currently dominant Prometheus.
This talk will put you on the right track for choosing the right monitoring solution for your needs.
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