Open Observability Summit + OTel Community Day 2025

The year is 2025, and it's pretty safe to assume that most of us have used "Generative AI" (or GenAI) at least once to produce images from prompts. Rumors say that some of us even used that as an excuse to buy a fancy new GPU and run models like Stable Diffusion locally, "For Science!", of course.

In this talk, we'll set aside the feelings (positive or negative!) that we might harbor for generative AI and use them as an excuse, not to buy shiny new GPUs, but to learn how to build a practical Spring + Java application in a GenAI context, deploy it on Kubernetes, and instead of tracing GPU invoices, we’ll trace our application’s behavior using distributed tracing.

Using Spring, we’ll store prompts in a database and submit them to generative models. Image results will be stored and then displayed. The application will take advantage of Kubernetes batch job processing facilities and implement reasonable security policies by leveraging RBAC. We will also look into distributed tracing, using OpenTelemetry, Grafana, and Grafana Tempo, to visualize the lifecycle of our requests as they pass through our application.