Where's My Pod? End-to-End Tracing for Kubernetes With OpenTelemetry

Learn how to implement comprehensive observability for Kubernetes pod lifecycles using OpenTelemetry tracing in this conference talk from Netflix engineers. Discover how Netflix's Compute team solved the mystery of pod deployment issues during their migration from a custom infrastructure stack to open-source Kubernetes, containerd, and CRI. Explore the practical implementation of end-to-end tracing that connects Netflix's custom scheduler, kubelet's syncPod operations, and container runtime traces to create a complete observability solution. Understand how this tracing approach revealed hidden bottlenecks including global locks that impacted pod scaling and container registry issues affecting launch times. Gain insights into transforming pod observability through real-world examples and story-driven explanations that demonstrate how to diagnose and resolve common Kubernetes deployment mysteries with confidence.