Cloud-Native Observability Lab

A production-inspired environment built to demonstrate end-to-end observability across a realistic distributed system — not a single instrumented service, but the kind of messy, multi-component setup that actually shows up in a POV.

Planned architecture

• A frontend, multiple backend services, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Kafka, containerized and deployed to Kubernetes.
• A mix of AWS-native compute — Kubernetes, serverless — to reflect how real environments blend platforms rather than living entirely in one.
• Full OpenTelemetry instrumentation across metrics, logs, traces, and profiles, with synthetic monitoring and k6 load generation exercising the system continuously.
• Intentional failure scenarios (latency injection, resource exhaustion, dependency failures) so the observability layer has something real to catch.

Why this project

Most public observability demos instrument a single toy service. The gap I keep seeing in POVs is troubleshooting across services — correlating a slow checkout to a Kafka consumer lag to a noisy neighbor pod. This lab is built to make that correlation path visible and reproducible.

Status

This project is in the planning stage. Build notes, architecture diagrams, and code will land here incrementally as pieces come online — check back, or watch the GitHub repo once it's published.