blog: KubeCon EU 2026

[jiekun]

This PR creates the blog post for KubeCon Europe 2026.

• I have read and followed the Contributing docs, especially the "First-time contributing?" section.
• This PR has content that I did not fully write myself.
  • I used AI and I have read and followed the Generative AI Contribution Policy.
• I have the experience and knowledge necessary to understand, review, and validate all content in this PR.¹

---

Preview: https://deploy-preview-8962--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026

Footnotes

1. Yes, I can answer maintainer questions about the content of this PR, without using AI. ↩

[jiekun]

As discussed before in #otel-comm channel, I'd like to draft this blog post with script.

For easier access and use of the script result:

• JSON output

I placed the following info in result:

{
	"event_name": "KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026",
	"description": "Have you considered the traffic consumed by tail-sampling traces in large-scale setups, where:\n1. Apps run across clusters/AZs.\n2. Trace spans from apps must be sent to an intermediate OpenTelemetry collector for tail-sampling.\n\nWhile cross-cluster/AZ traffic is unavoidable, most spans sent over the network get discarded, wasting much bandwidth.\n\nIn this session, we\u2019ll share the retroactive sampling approach: each OpenTelemetry collector buffers spans from the node/cluster it resides in, sending only necessary data to the centralized trace backend for decision-making. The backend then requests raw spans only if the trace is marked as sampled.\n\nBy joining our session, you'll have more insights into:\n1. How tail-sampling burns your costs and how retroactive sampling cuts them by 9x.\n2. How to use the OpenTelemetry collector for retroactive sampling: architecture design and benefit-maximizing strategies.\n3. Practical ways to adopt it in your existing architecture, plus trade-off analysis.",
	"title": "Retroactive Sampling with OpenTelemetry: Cut 90% Distributed Tracing Bandwidth Usage - Zhu Jiekun, VictoriaMetrics & Jayice Zhou, Baidu",
	"speakers": [{
		"name": "Zhu Jiekun",
		"company": "Software Engineer, VictoriaMetrics"
	}, {
		"name": "Jayice Zhou",
		"company": "Software Engineer, Baidu"
	}],
	"starttime": "Tuesday March 24, 2026 17:00 - 17:30CET",
	"room": "Hall 12",
	"link": "https://kccnceu2026.sched.com/event/2CW83/retroactive-sampling-with-opentelemetry-cut-90-distributed-tracing-bandwidth-usage-zhu-jiekun-victoriametrics-jayice-zhou-baidu"
}

To use the Python script directly:

• python ./sched_session_info_collection.py
• disclaimer: This script was written in 10 minutes, please don’t expect elegant code/clean implementation here. But it should be very easy to modify.

And note:

• finding sessions with keywords (otel, opentelemetry, ottl, otlp, open telemetry) is easy, but it includes some irrelevant sessions or sessions that are not focus on OpenTelemetry.
  • I did manually check over main conference & Maintainer Summit sessions.
  • Sessions in Observability Day are all preserved.

[chalin]

Can you also commit the script?

[chalin]

/fix:all

[otelbot-docs]

✅ fix:all applied successfully in run 21481172502.

[jiekun]

Can you also commit the script?

Do you mean including the script as part of the pull request to the repository? Sure will do

but as a reminder currently the script generates sessions which hit keywords (otel, otlp, ottl, opentelemetry, etc...), while in the pull request, I re-check and removed some of them as they're not focus on OTel.

The script is helpful to generate formatted session list, but we still cannot just run + copy-paste them (to update the blog post).

[dmathieu]

This is unrelated and shouldn't be changed :)

[pellared]

Suggested change

	Robert Pająk, a Cisco company<br> Tuesday March 24, 2026 16:15 - 16:45CET
	Robert Pająk, Splunk<br> Tuesday March 24, 2026 16:15 - 16:45CET

or at least

Suggested change

	Robert Pająk, a Cisco company<br> Tuesday March 24, 2026 16:15 - 16:45CET
	Robert Pająk, Splunk, a Cisco company<br> Tuesday March 24, 2026 16:15 - 16:45CET