Scale 23x – Cloud Native Days 2026 Talks: Magical Mystery Tour: A Roundup of Observability Datastores & DevOps is a Foreign Language (or Why There Are No Junior SREs)

Conference Talk

Scale 23x – Cloud Native Days 2026 Talks: Magical Mystery Tour: A Roundup of Observability Datastores & DevOps is a Foreign Language (or Why There Are No Junior SREs)

SCaLE 23x – the 23rd Annual Southern California Linux Expo – will take place on March 5-8, 2026, at the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, CA.
We look forward to bringing together the open source community in the greater LA area for another year of learning, building, and sharing.

Our colleague, Joshua Lee, will present his talks:

• Magical Mystery Tour: A Roundup of Observability Datastores
• DevOps is a Foreign Language (or Why There Are No Junior SREs)

• Magical Mystery Tour: A Roundup of Observability Datastores

From plain-old Postgres to the LGTM stack, ELK, Cassandra, and ClickHouse, the landscape of telemetry storage options is as vast as it is overwhelming. With so many choices, how do we decide which datastore is right for the job? In this talk, Joshua will guide attendees through the foundational principles of telemetry—covering metrics, traces, logs, profiles, and wide events—and break down the strengths and limitations of different database technologies for each use case. We’ll examine how traditional relational databases like Postgres can still hold their own, where ELK and CockroachDB fit into the picture, and why specialized stacks like LGTM (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) are so popular in modern observability pipelines. And, of course, we’ll highlight the growing role of ClickHouse as a versatile and high-performance option for logs, traces, and more and VictoriaMetrics as a drop-in replacement for Prometheus. By the end of this session, attendees will have a clearer understanding of the trade-offs between these datastores and how to make informed decisions based on the unique requirements of their systems. Whether you’re building an observability stack from scratch or looking to optimize an existing setup, this tour of the observability datastore landscape will leave you better equipped to navigate the options.

• DevOps is a Foreign Language (or Why There Are No Junior SREs)

DevOps has a notoriously steep learning curve. Getting started in the field can feel like being dropped in a foreign country without the ability to understand *anything* about the language. 

A language is more than just the syntax and semantic rules of the words themselves. It also encompasses the shared culture of the speakers. With the proliferation of programming languages as well as the deeply held cultural beliefs of the community, it’s easy to see that learning DevOps is like trying to learn a foreign language.

I will review five foundational hypotheses from the field of Second Language Acquisition and relate these hypotheses back to the world of DevOps. DevOps practitioners, trainers, tool builders, and learners should all come away with useful insights to apply to their practice.

About the Presenters

Joshua Lee – Open Source Developer Advocate at Altinity

Whether it’s operators or observability, agile or accessibility, his expertise shines because he is passionate about all of it. He’s been building software for more than a decade, and he loves sharing experiences via public speaking. He is currently a Developer Advocate for Altinity, where he helps create educational content about ClickHouse® and OpenTelemetry, and he is a contributor to the OpenTelemetry project.