🧳 Trip Report: OpenSearchCon '24

Last week I was in SF for OpenSearchCon and had a blast!

Of all the conferences, and trade shows I attend (which is oh-so-many as a developer advocate) open source events are my absolute fave, the community and camaraderie make for a great atmosphere 💙

Keynote

Jim Zemlin mentioned this paper , The Value of Open Source Software, during the keynote which was a joint effort between the Linux Foundation and Harvard Business School which attempted to answer the very big question "what is the economic value of open source software?"

We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist.

That is a staggering sum. Trillion with a "t"! It is really not even a sum that's comprehensible.

Despite this enormous value being created and the critical role open source plays worldwide... I don't know any devs that get into OSS for the money. If anything folks are lucky to work on open source as a treat or only make contributions that directly benefit a use case for their company.

Later on Jim notes the 4 factors for successful open collaboration ecosystems and I was happy to see Developer Financial Support listed! Was also stoked to see a reference to "do-acracy" in the wild which I'd been researching as an approach for decision-making at a co-op.

Session: We Love OpenSearch So You Don't Have To!

Intrigued by the title I popped over to this session hosted by Abe Abernethy & Rick Boldt from Greylog who have been there and done that when it comes to everything OpenSearch.

They talked through what it takes from the basics, configuring indexes, visualizations and more to deliver a "check engine light for security analysts" with OpenSearch and wrapped up with customer case studies and one of my fave slides:

If you administer and operate OpenSearch, well worth a watch 👏

Session: One More Day - Hyperfixated on an Apocalypse

As someone new to OpenSearch and only foggy distant memories of an ELK stack being shoved at me for a subset of infra logs that I mostly ignored, I knew if I wanted to get familiar with OpenSearch it'd need to be for something I cared about. Nate Boot's session gave me that inspiration! (and now I want to play Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead)

Nate noted that OpenSearch is quite easy to get stood up but what really matters is the Time to First (Custom Dashboard | Data Exploration | Insight) and wanted to show folks how to take the leap and add their own data.

Walking through the steps to spin up an OpenSearch cluster, throw in some game data from Cataclysm, and adding a simple search UI I learned just how straightforward it is to get up and running to explore and search your own dataset if you've got some JSON handy. With his interface he could quickly access recipes, search for info about an item, all super fast!

💡 My brain instantly thought "omg you gotta do this for Stardew Valley" because I basically am the worst villager ever and never remember what gifts people like (or more importantly what they hate) and am very suspicious of adding any mods. The other idea was to use OpenSearch as a personal search engine of sorts, connecting my Ravelry library, knitting/crochet/etc patterns stored in my Backblaze bucket, and patterns I've bookmarked as "want to make" so when I get the urge to knit a sweater or beanie I'm not starting the search at square one (or looking in like 3 diff places)....

Session: The Future of Cybersecurity: Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) & OpenSearch

idk what distinguishes cybersecurity from security but my main takeaway from this was that OCSF is creating an industry-wide open standard schema for security events (sort of like how OpenTelemetry created the standard schema for distributed traces) and this is something I'll be paying attention to as it grows!

Session: Building an Observability Workflow

AHHHH this session showed me how freaking cool Vega is as a means to provide interactivity for dashboards. Lior Perry walks through how to build an investigation flow for a specific use case to shepherd someone from dashboard to dashboard bringing along the relevant context and filters

This little flow below is actually embedded in dashboards, sort of like a map for you to follow, I suspect most of this type of information lives in playbooks or people's heads. While not every investigation can follow a pre-determined path, I would've loved to have this back when I was on teams that provided CI/CD pipelines to devs since most support requests, like 99% of them, only required basic troubleshooting.

Wrap Up

This was a mere sampling of sessions, the full recordings, including the unconference are already available here!

OpenSearchCon truly set the bar high for free events! Add it to your list next year 😄

CAT TAX