James humphries
As Head of OpenSource at Spacelift and a full-time Maintainer for OpenTofu, I specialize in integrating infrastructure as code tools and improving people's workflows.
With expertise across a wide assortment of tools, I've played a pivotal role in forking OpenTofu and developing its registry. I am extremely passionate about enhancing developer experiences.
Sessions
Infrastructure-as-code runs are black boxes. When a deployment takes 20 minutes, operators have no visibility into what's actually slow: provider API calls,s tate operations, network latency, or something else entirely. Traditional logs show what happened, but not why it's slow.
This talk demonstrates how OpenTofu integrated native OpenTelemetry support to expose infrastructure deployment internals through distributed tracing. The speaker walks through real-world debugging scenarios where OTel traces revealed hidden bottlenecks such as slow provider downloads, inefficient state operations, and API throttling, previously all things that may be invisible in traditional logs.