Josh Lee Creates

KCD New York

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Uncovered: The Hard Truth About OTel’s Vendor-Neutrality Link to heading

Telemetry That Matters Link to heading

KCD Czech & Slovak

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

OpenTelemetry: Playtime Is Over Link to heading

So you finally got your organization to invest in OpenTelemetry. You carefully evaluated observability backends and picked the perfect one. Everything is awesome. Then twelve months later, your costs have skyrocketed and you can’t explain why. What happened?

This talk examines how to emit meaningful telemetry while keeping costs under control, by exploring why the easy path isn’t always the best path, what to actually instrument, which metrics to focus on, pipeline efficiency with tools like OTel Arrow, sampling, filtering, intentional instrumentation, and schema management and validation with tools like Weaver.

SREday Munich

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

OpenTelemetry: Playtime Is Over Link to heading

This talk examines how to emit meaningful telemetry while keeping costs under control, by exploring what to actually instrument, which metrics to focus on, pipeline efficiency with OTel Arrow, sampling, filtering, intentional instrumentation, and schema management and validation with tools like Weaver.

KubeCon EU Maintainer's Summit

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cloud Native Rejekts EU

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

SCaLE 23x

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

DevOps is a Foreign Language - Friday 10:00am, Ballroom F - Video

Magical Mystery Tour - Friday 12:30pm, Ballroom A

Slides Link to heading

DevOpsNotDead NYC

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

DevOps is a Foreign Language Link to heading

Slides

Resources Link to heading

roadmap.sh

BuildDevCon Cloud Native Databases

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The OpenTelemetry Collector: My Homelab Multitool

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Monitoring a homelab shouldn’t require a PhD in observability pipelines. Yet somehow, we all end up with a rat’s nest of exporters, agents, and databases that barely talk to each other. After years of fighting this complexity, I’ve landed on the OpenTelemetry Collector as the single tool that ties everything together.

ClickHouse is the other piece of the puzzle here. I’m definitely biased since I work with ClickHouse daily at my job, but if you look under the hood of just about any modern observability platform from the last few years, you’ll probably find a little ClickHouse in there. For me, it provides a unified platform that can store all of my telemetry signals alongside other types of events - a one-stop shop for “real-time” analytics.

FOSDEM

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Magical Mystery Tour: Roundup of Observability Datastores Link to heading

From plain-old Postgres to the Grafana stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, and Mimir), OpenSearch, 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 OpenSearch and Prometheus 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.

What I Pack for Work Travel

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

2025 has been a busy year for me - 100k miles flown to get to 24 conferences across 12 countries. That’s a lot of time moving!

As a result of two plus years of this type of travel, I’ve developed some systems that aren’t perfect, but help make all the movement a little more manageable.

The First Rule of DevRel Travel: We’re all in this together Link to heading

In role-playing games there is the saying, “It’s dangerous to go alone.” A short story, and then I’ll get back to my packing lists…

Open Source Summit Japan

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

SeaGL

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Open Source Analytics Conference (OSACON)

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

KCD Porto

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Open Source Observability Day

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Uncovered: The Hard Truth About OTel’s Vendor-Neutrality Link to heading

Slides

Magical Mystery Tour: Roundup of Observability Datastores Link to heading

Slides

Database Frontiers

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

O11y in One: ClickHouse as a Unified Telemetry Database Link to heading

Slides

KCD Warsaw

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Uncovered: The Hard Truth About OTel’s Vendor-Neutrality Link to heading

Slides

Cloud Native Days Austria

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Uncovered: The Hard Truth About OTel’s Vendor-Neutrality Link to heading

Slides

Texas Linux Fest

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Magical Mystery Tour: Roundup of Observability Datastores Link to heading

Slides

devopsdays Philadelphia

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

DevOpsCon New York

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Fast, Cheap, DIY Observability Link to heading

Resources Link to heading

Log Structured Merge Tree Blog Kubernetes Cluster Logging with ClickHouse® and OpenTelemetry | Altinity Blog Kubernetes Cluster Logging with the OpenTelemetry Collector and ClickHouse® | Grafana | Open Source - YouTube Deep Dive on OpenTelemetry ClickHouse® exporter | Prometheus | Grafana | Time Series Data - YouTube O11y in One: Exploring ClickHouse as a Unified Telemetry Database | Josh Lee | SREday London 2025 Q4 - YouTube

SREDay London

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

O11y in One: ClickHouse as a Unified Telemetry Database Link to heading

Slides

Community Over Code NA

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Where’s the Auto in Auto-Instrumentation? Link to heading

Slides

Tracing a Cloud-Native Database Link to heading

Slides

Open Source Summit Europe

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Modern Application Debugging: An Intro to OpenTelemetry Link to heading

In this talk, Joshua will share his insights and experiences with OpenTelemetry, an open-source project that offers protocols, APIs, and SDKs for collecting metrics, traces, and logs from applications and services. He will cover the comprehensive toolkit provided by the OpenTelemetry community, including language SDKs, the Collector, and the OTLP formats for metrics, traces, and logs.

FOSSY

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

DevOps is a Foreign Language (or Why There Are No Junior SREs) Link to heading

Slides

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.

This talk explores parallels between learning DevOps and acquiring a foreign language, drawing on Second Language Acquisition hypotheses to provide insights for DevOps practitioners, trainers, tool builders, and learners.

Launching a New Podcast Limited Series: Single Pain (of Glass)

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m excited to announce the launch of a new limited-series podcast focused on AI workflows, automation, and how we’re all adapting to this rapidly changing landscape.

Why This Podcast? Link to heading

The pace of change has made the future foggy. My co-host Mya and I don’t know what it looks like, but we believe:

The proliferation of autonomous agents will make it even more important to have authoritative and verifiable sources of truth.
The mechanisms we use to share context with and collaborate with LLMs will be one of the most productive areas for advancement within the next 1-2 years.
When applied effectively, AI agents reduce tedium and increase the time that we get to spend on creative higher-level thinking.

We’re openly sharing our learning journey and how we’re adapting to these changes.

Open Source Summit North America

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

SouthEast LinuxFest

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My NixOS-Powered Homelab Link to heading

Slides

Resources Link to heading

BSides Buffalo

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Red Hat Summit AnsibleFest

Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Boise Code Camp

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

OpenSearchCon Europe

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

LinuxFest Northwest

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Running Databases in Kubernetes the Cloud Native Way Link to heading

Kubernetes is all the rage in enterprise IT today. Your boss just read that databases are going cloud native and wants you to make it happen. This talk tells you how. We’ll start with a quick overview of the wants and needs of your average database. We’ll then show practical ways to map those needs to Kubernetes resources, including Deployments, Stateful Sets, and custom resources managed by operators. We’ll end with a quick tour of key issues like security, backups, upgrade, and scale-out. By the end of the talk you’ll understand the standard patterns for managing databases on Kubernetes and have links to working code that can take your studies first. Join us!

NixOS + Proxmox Part 2: Overlay Networking with Tailscale and Proxmox SDNs

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Note: I no longer use this setup. This post is kept for reference but the approach described here has been deprecated in my homelab.

In this post we’ll use Tailscale to connect Proxmox VE hosts across the public internet. We’ll do this by combining Proxmox SDNs (Software Defined Networks) with Tailscale for overlay networking.

Prerequisites Link to heading

In order to follow along, you will need access to one or more Proxmox VE hosts, a free tailscale account, and nix installed locally.

State of Open Con UK 25

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

FOSDEM

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

CodeMash

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

DevOps Stage

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

KubeCon & CloudNativeCon North America: Maintainer's Track

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

KubeCon & CloudNativeCon North America: Observability Day

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

CloudNative Rejekts

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

DevFest ATL

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Open Source Observability Day

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

OpenInfra Days North America

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

DevOpsDays Tampa Bay

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

NixOS + Proxmox: A Recipe for a Declarative Homelab

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Using NixOS with Proxmox: A Declarative Approach to Homelab Configuration Link to heading

Ever since I started using Proxmox, I’ve wanted something like a Dockerfile to define my VMs. With my developer background, configuration as code just makes sense.

For a while, I did what most people do—I created a base image that worked for me and carefully crafted Ansible plays to shape that image into the various setups I needed.

DevOpsDays Nashville

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Lessons from the Tabletop: Sharing the Narrative

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 14:30:53 +0000

If you’re reading this, you’re probably already familiar with Critical Role — By far one of the most popular live streams of tabletop roleplaying. The show’s GM, Matt Mercer, has several famous lines, but perhaps the most famous is “How do you want to do this?”

For context, Matt will ask this of his players when they have delivered the killing blow to a major opponent. What the simple phrase communicates to the player is: “By the rules of the game, the enemy is defeated — you get to narratively describe how it happens.”

DevOpsDays Austin

Fri, 03 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

DevOpsDays Buffalo

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

DevOpsDays Boise

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

DevOpsDays Tampa Bay

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

DeveloperWeek CloudX

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

DevOpsDays NYC

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Submitting Your First Conference Talk

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 08:30:53 +0000

Submitting a conference talk in the tech industry can be a thrilling and nerve-wracking experience, especially if it’s your first time. The thought of presenting your ideas to a room full of experts and industry professionals can be intimidating, but also an opportunity to showcase your skills, gain recognition, and network with others in your field.

Whether you’re a seasoned speaker or just starting out, this guide will provide you with tips to help you make the most of your conference talk submission and increase your chances of being selected to speak.

What I'm Ditching in 2023

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 08:30:53 +0000

I saw a relatable plea on my social media feed this month: “Please, 2023, I don’t need you to be my year, I just need you to sit quietly in the corner and not make any noise.”

I don’t really do New Years Resolutions, but one of the side effects for me of the past three years has been an ever increasing clarity on what works for me and what doesn’t. Along with that clarity has come a willingness to simply say “Ok, Bye!” to anything and anyone that doesn’t bring me in the direction of being the person that I want to be.

With that in mind, there are some professional tools that I have been using for most of my career that I will be stepping away from this year, for various reasons.

A Developer's Guide to WordPress

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 08:30:53 +0000

Let’s take a look at the most popular CMS on the planet: WordPress. If you’re a developer inexperienced with WordPress, some of what you’re about to read will surely make you cringe.

If you’re a senior engineer who wants to understand the architecture of WordPress, then this guide is for you.

So let’s pull back the curtain and take a look at some of the architecture in WordPress:

Posts — One Table to Rule Them All Link to heading

WordPress was initially built for blogging, and so its core model is called the post. In WordPress, almost everything is a post. The built-in post types besides post (blog posts) are: page, attachment, and link*.

Lessons from the Tabletop: Know Your Domain

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 12:28:52 +0000

This is Part III in my series Lessons from the Tabletop: Things I’ve learned about project management from Dungeons & Dragons*. Read Part I. Part II.*

Many dungeon masters fall victim to the trap of over-preparation.

Spending a lot of time preparing a specific plan for a game can make it difficult to let go of that plan (as I wrote in Part II). One might conclude that planning is a waste of time. As an absolute, this could not be more wrong.

Using git on Small Teams: Best Practices

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 15:59:08 +0000

There are a lot of ways to use git to collaborate with other developers. I’ve found the following principles to be useful for keeping my sanity when working with git. My experience has mostly been with small teams of two to six developers, but these principles may apply to any size team. Of course, “best practices” are elusive, and the following is just my established method.

Commandments: Link to heading

Do not commit vendor code.
Do not commit compiled code.
Do not commit commented-out code — just delete it.
Make small commits.
Explain the why, not the what, in your commit message.
Create a new branch for every task / small feature / bug fix.
Rebase instead of merge to resolve conflicts.
Use pull requests. Get reviews.
Do not commit or push directly to the master branch.
Deploy from the master branch to staging.

“Master” branch only contains reviewed code, merged via PR Link to heading

When an entire QA department is not available, the best QA gains can be had by ensuring every single line of code is seen by at least 2 developers before being merged into the master branch.

Lessons from the Tabletop: Letting Go

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 05:48:20 +0000

This is part II in my series Lessons from the Tabletop: Things I’ve learned about project management from Dungeons & Dragons*. Read Part I here.*

Game masters also have an inside joke: “No plot survives contact with the players.”

When I attempt to drive the plot, dictate the player options and the pacing, the players begin to disengage. The same thing happens on teams when a leader begins to white-knuckle the steering wheel.

Lessons from the Tabletop: Things I've Learned about Project Management from Dungeons & Dragons

Tue, 10 Oct 2017 05:59:13 +0000

For the past year or so, I’ve been getting together with a group of friends once a week to play Dungeons and Dragons. The popular role-playing game from the ‘70s has enjoyed something of a resurgence in the last few years.

In the game, 4-6 players act as characters that they create using randomized dice rolls. One player, the game master, tells the other players about the world and what they see. The players respond by saying what they’d like their characters to do, and the game master will tell them if they need to roll any dice to determine the outcome of the attempted action.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Whether it’s operators or observability, agile or accessibility, my expertise shines because I’m passionate about all of it. Quick to propose elegant solutions to multifaceted problems, I often arrive at innovative answers by taking into account small nuances or correlations that were overlooked by others.

While my technical expertise has proven indispensable to clients over the years, they truly appreciate me for me ability to explain complex software in accessible ways.

Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Connect with me Link to heading

I’m fairly active on all of these social networks: Bluesky Mastodon LinkedIn

Chat with me Link to heading

The AltinityDB Slack is a great place to chat about ClickHouse® and other related topics. Altinity Slack

Videos

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000