Kubernetes Autoscaling Demands New Observability Focus beyond Vendor Tooling

Craig Risi — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

As adoption of Kubernetes autoscalers like Karpenter accelerates, a new set of platform-agnostic observability practices is emerging, shifting focus from traditional infrastructure metrics to deeper insights into provisioning behavior, scheduling latency, and cost efficiency.

By Craig Risi

Discord Engineers Add Distributed Tracing to Elixir's Actor Model without Performance Penalty

Steef-Jan Wiggers — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:13:00 GMT

Discord engineering detailed how they added distributed tracing to Elixir's actor model. Their custom Transport library wraps messages with trace context and uses dynamic sampling to handle million-user fanouts. CPU optimizations included skipping unsampled traces and filtering context before deserialization, recovering 10+ percentage points of overhead.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

InfoQ - Observability

Kubernetes Autoscaling Demands New Observability Focus beyond Vendor Tooling

Discord Engineers Add Distributed Tracing to Elixir's Actor Model without Performance Penalty