Philipp Krenn

From Elastic

YAML Considered Harmful

Quickie

We have all become YAML engineers, because everybody loves it, right?! Sometimes it can also burn you pretty badly and this is what this talk is about.

We dive into some common errors people encounter when working with YAML. These seem to be commonly accepted, which might be a form of the Stockholm Syndrome. And we are also taking a quick look at alternative formats and what they do (not) have to offer. Will you still love your YAML files after this talk? Let's see...

Centralized Logging Patterns

Conference

Most organizations feel the need to centralize their logs — once you have more than a couple of servers or containers, SSH and tail will not serve you well any more. However, the common question or struggle is how to achieve that.

This talk presents multiple approaches and patterns with their advantages and disadvantages, so you can pick the one that fits your organization best:

• Parse: Take the log files of your applications and extract the relevant pieces of information.
• Send: Add a log appender to send out your events directly without persisting them to a log file.
• Structure: Write your events in a structured file, which you can then centralize.
• Containerize: Keep track of short lived containers and configure their logging correctly.
• Orchestrate: Stay on top of your logs even when services are short lived and dynamically allocated on Kubernetes.

Each pattern has its own demo with the open source Elastic Stack (previously called ELK Stack), so you can easily try out the different approaches in your environment. Though the general patterns are applicable with any centralized logging system.