Episode #12
OpenTelemetry Blueprints Unveiled: Practical OTel Deployments for Kubernetes & Platform Engineering - OpenObservability Talks S6E12
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is now the industry standard for observability — but deploying it successfully at scale is still a major challenge. In this episode of OpenObservability Talks, we dive into the newly launched OpenTelemetry Blueprints initiative: a set of practical reference architectures designed to help Platform Engineering and SRE teams cut through the complexity. We explore the first official blueprints for Kubernetes and traditional infrastructure environments, covering: ✅ How to standardize OTel Collector deployments ✅ Best practices for instrumentation at scale ✅ Building self-service observability platforms ✅ What these blueprints mean for Platform Engineering and SRE teams Whether you're just starting your OpenTelemetry journey or trying to scale it across a large organization, this episode gives you a concrete, actionable framework to move faster and with more confidence. You can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/67db96d7e512/ 🔔 Subscribe for monthly conversations on open-source observability, OTel, open source and cloud-native monitoring. Show Notes: 00:00 - intro 03:05 - end-user pains with OpenTelemetry adoption 07:49 - enterprise org structure dictates OTel adoption patterns 12:56 - what’s the different between blueprints and reference implementations, and what can you expect of an OTel blueprint 19:46 - how blueprints balance OpenTelemetry’s flexibility with opinionation 23:11 - first blueprint: OpenTelemetry for traditional Environments, virtual machines, bare metal and non-Kubernetes 32:42 - second blueprint: OpenTelemetry for Kubernetes Workloads and managed telemetry 49:08 - third blueprint: Kubernetes monitoring with OpenTelemetry. 56:16 - roadmap for the OpenTelemettry blueprints initiative 1:00:01 - outro Resources: OTel Blueprints: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/guidance/ Blueprints intro blog: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2026/blueprints-intro/ OpAMP intro and updates: https://horovits.medium.com/operating-opentelemetry-at-scale-with-opamp-737b6af8222b Dotan Horovits ============ X (Twitter): @horovits LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon BlueSky: @horovits.bsky.social Dan Gomez Blanco ================ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielgblanco86/ Mastodon: https://mas.to/@dan_gomezblanco Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dangb.me Socials: BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/openobservability.bsky.social X (Twitter): https://x.com/OpenObserv LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/openobservability/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.
