BPF origin story and the future of telemetry analytics OpenObservability Talks S2E06

OpenObservability Talks

OpenObservability Talks S2E06: Hosting Steve McCanne

We hear a lot about BPF in the industry today, applying this flexible technology to solve so many problems from routing, proxying, and of course observability. Correlating events and data from the operating system level across distributed systems is a key problem for the industry and community to solve. I am thrilled to announce Steve McCanne joining us for this episode. I have been lucky enough to spend time with Steve in my career and am delighted to have him join us to discuss the origin stories and where these foundational technologies might be applied in the future. Steve’s Bio and background speak for themselves.

Steve McCanne is the "Coding CEO" at Brim, a small startup working on the open-source Zed Project and a new application called "Brim" that leverages Zed. Back in the days before the Web, Steve worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he developed BPF, libpcap, the PCAP file format, and the tcpdump language and compiler, while also working on the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) for Internet video when the telcos claimed that real-time Internet communication was impossible without end-to-end virtual-circuit guarantees. (Guess who was right?) After a brief stint in academia in the late '90s, Steve crossed over to the dark side, became a tech entrepreneur, and never looked back. He has founded several startups and took his '02 company and Sharkfest's sponsor, Riverbed, public in '06.

Resources

The USENEX paper from 1993 on BPF architecture: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/sd93/mccanne.pdf

Open source tools Steve shared in the podcast:
https://github.com/brimdata/zed https://github.com/brimdata/brim

Steve's GitHub BPF repo: https://github.com/brimdata/zbpf
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