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An Introduction to Cloud Native Observability

Guangya Liu
6 min readMar 28, 2024

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In the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud computing, observability has emerged as a critical concept, especially within cloud-native environments. Cloud native observability goes beyond traditional monitoring, offering deep insights into the behavior, performance, and health of applications and infrastructure that are designed specifically for the cloud. This comprehensive visibility is paramount for maintaining reliability, efficiency, and security in cloud-native systems.

Understanding Cloud Native

Before diving into observability, let’s clarify what cloud native means. Cloud native refers to a set of practices and technologies designed to take full advantage of cloud computing. This includes microservices architectures, containerization (e.g., Docker), orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), immutable infrastructure, and continuous delivery. Cloud native is about how applications are created and deployed, not where.

The Principals of Observability

Observability, as a discipline within software engineering and systems management, is founded on several core principles that enable teams to understand and improve complex systems. These principles are designed to help organizations monitor, diagnose, and optimize their applications and infrastructure in real time. Let’s explore some of the key principles of observability:

  • Comprehensive Data Collection for Logs, Metrics, and Traces: Observability…

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Guangya Liu
Guangya Liu

Written by Guangya Liu

STSM@IBM, Member - IBM Academy of Technology, Observability, AI and Open Source.

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