When you code enterprise applications on top of the Java Platform, most of the time, you use ORMs to interface them with relational databases. They bring a lot of simplicity which make you forget SQL queries syntax. Furthermore, most of the time, Java developers don’t really care/know what is under the hood of Spring Data and Java Persistence API (JPA) or such a facility. In my opinion, it’s mainly due to all the features provided by these specifications and frameworks.

Early in my career, when the documentation was not so spread across the Internet, I had to buy and crack open books to learn new things. I stumbled upon of Le Monde en “Tique”, a famous Parisian bookstore getting books of Java EE, XML, or whatever else.

I then realised, even with the number of documentations, articles, videos growing on Internet, I learnt far better new topics reading books.

1 The sad reality

Picture this: it’s Friday afternoon, and you’re eagerly looking forward to unwinding for the weekend. Suddenly, an Ops engineer alerts you about a critical issue—a stubborn HTTP 500 error that’s causing a major roadblock.

Despite the dedicated efforts of the Ops engineers, the root cause remains elusive due to a lack of contextual information.

Hours pass by, but you take it upon yourself to delve into the problem. Eventually, after reproducing and debugging the issue on your computer, you uncover the issue.

1 2023 in a Nutshell

As we approach 2024, it’s time to cast a professional eye back on 2023.

Throughout the year, I’ve balanced work on a customer project alongside my contributions to the Worldline TechRel¹ initiative. Each involvement has fueled the other, offering a reciprocal flow of inspiration. Involvement in real-life projects has often sparked new ideas for talks and topics to delve into. In turn, my experiences in Dev Rel have offered fresh perspectives and external feedback, enriching the implementation process.

Just out of curiosity, I downloaded and sat up Rancher Desktop on my laptop.

I daily use Docker and Docker compose on top of WSL2 using home made mechanism/tooling I would then see if Rancher Desktop fits well in this case and could help me.

In this (very short) article, we’ll go over the necessary steps to configure WSL2 Ubuntu virtual machines and Docker with Rancher Desktop.

If you want to get into Rancher Desktop in another way and discover how to install Skaffold, you can read this article.

In my last article, I dug into Distributed Tracing and exposed how to enable it in Java applications. We didn’t see yet how to deploy an application on Kubernetes and get distributed tracing insights. Several strategies can be considered, but the main point is how to minimize the impact of deploying APM agents on the whole delivery process.

In this article, I will expose how to ship APM agents for instrumenting Java applications deployed on top of Kubernetes through Docker containers.

1 Introduction

In today’s dynamic landscape, Distributed Tracing has emerged as an indispensable practice. It helps to understand what is under the hood of distributed transactions, providing answers to pivotal questions: What comprises these diverse requests? What contextual information accompanies them? How extensive is their duration?

Since the introduction of Google’s Dapper, a plethora of tracing solutions has flooded the scene. Among them, OpenTelemetry has risen as the frontrunner. Other alternatives such as Elastic APM and DynaTrace are also available.