KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026

This session is based on real production experience building and operating an observability-driven CI/CD platform using CNCF projects. It shows how OpenTelemetry can extend beyond application monitoring to become a core primitive for modern CI/CD systems.

While running dozens of Kubernetes clusters and handling 60M+ requests per minute, costly east-west network load balancers and fragmented CI metrics created blind spots that hid deployment failures. Traditional dashboards showed healthy systems, while rollouts quietly broke.

We share how treating Jenkins pipelines as distributed systems enabled end-to-end tracing across builds, deployments, and runtime behavior. By correlating CI signals with OpenTelemetry traces, we detected cascading failures and closed the loop with automated GitOps rollbacks. The talk covers real challenges, trade-offs, and lessons learned to build reliable, self-healing delivery pipelines.