Costa Tsaousis spoke at FOSSCOMM 2024, held November 9–10 at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki. FOSSCOMM is Greece’s largest open-source conference, and for Netdata – a project with Greek roots – it was a homecoming of sorts.
The talk, “Netdata: Open Source, Distributed Observability Pipeline – Journey and Challenges,” covered the full arc: how the project started, the architectural decisions that defined it, the community that grew around it, and the ongoing challenges of maintaining a large open-source codebase that millions of nodes depend on. Costa did not shy away from the hard parts – the difficulty of balancing open-source community expectations with commercial product development, and the engineering cost of supporting an agent that runs on everything from a Raspberry Pi to a 256-core production server.
FOSSCOMM draws students, academics, and professional developers from across Greece. The audience was a mix of people who already use Netdata and people encountering it for the first time. For the former, the behind-the-scenes look at project challenges was the draw. For the latter, seeing a globally used open-source project led by a Greek founder at a Greek university was its own kind of motivation.
