CNCF Meetup Recap: Hello Lemur!

Tuesday March 3rd was another great day for community as the Boston CNCF Meetup group arrived at the Turbonomic offices on Boylston street in Boston for a great evening of discussions and learning.  I was happy to be able to be in town for the event and to watch as my colleague, Meng Ding, who presented the Turbonomic Lemur project.

With the challenges of Coronavirus, it was actually quite a good turnout.  I know that a lot of folks are re-evaluating meetup and travel policies.  Big thanks go out to Chris Graham and Asena Hertz from the Turbonomic team for pulling this together.

Introducing Turbonomic Lemur

The Turbonomic Lemur project is a packaged set of open source tools which includes Grafana, Kiali, Jaeger, and also a light version of Turbonomic which allows for the visualization of the dependencies and resourcing of the entire containerized stack.  This project has been created because of the amount of requests we hear out in the community about how challenging it can be to configure and deploy these tools, plus that even with them, there is no context to how it relates to the actual applications.  

Meng kicked off the event with a demo of what Lemur is and what it looks like when deployed.  Being able to have a single interface for all of the tooling and easy ways to interact with the products was definitely a hit for the folks in the audience.  Since I’ve been contributing to the documentation and some community engagement work for Lemur, this was especially exciting to see that people really loved what it did as a graphical tool….but then the real fun began!

Lemur on the big screen!

The next part of the demo featured the featured the Lemurctl command line tool and this really got some folks excited about the potential.  Meng was able to easily spin up command lines that showed the different resources, utilization, and most importantly, the dependencies in a single CLI of everything from the app inside the container, through the container, pod, and node.  There was a literal “wait, you can see all that and the dependencies in a single CLI command?!” from someone in the audience.  So cool!!

Listening and Learning

Meng and all of the folks there are big fans of any community interaction because we can all learn so much from each other.  Tech and business do not exist in bubbles and learning from the lessons of others can really save time and effort for our own projects and deployments of new products and ideas.  Meng had a keen audience gathering after his presentation as you can see here:

There is much more planned for Lemur and for my own sharing of information about it.  If you’re keen to get involved with this or to learn more, jump into the Github for Lemur and take a look.  I’ll be posting some demo resources here on my blog as well in the coming weeks as I do more exploration and documentation to help folks get the most out of it and make it as easy as possible to build and deploy.

Meng and the entire engineering team who built it deserve some big kudos.  They’ve made three particularly challenging open platforms deployable in a single package.  That’s a massive time and resource saver.

Thanks to everyone again for supporting the CNCF meetup in Boston and the Lemur project.  Looking forward to sharing much more very soon!

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