#93 Beer Sales and Marriage Licenses: A DevOps Love Story?

In this episode, recorded live at DevWorld 2025 in Amsterdam, we sit down with Dave McAllister, Senior Open Source Technologist at NGINX, for a fast-paced, thought-provoking—and surprisingly funny—conversation about observability, statistics, and Kubernetes traffic management.

Dave takes us on a journey through the real meaning behind metrics like mean, median, and mode, and explains why so many DevOps teams misread their alerts and dashboards. Using eye-opening anecdotes (yes, including one about beer sales and marriage licenses), he breaks down the danger of acting on misleading correlations and why using the wrong statistical model can lead to chaos.

We also dive deep into the future of Ingress versus the Gateway API, the evolution of NGINX’s role in Kubernetes environments, and what makes some tools “just good enough” while others aim for performance and reliability at scale.

Expect insights on everything from Poisson distributions to eBPF, all wrapped in Dave’s sharp storytelling style and decades of open source experience.

https://acc-ict.com/live