Profiles Alpha blog post

[aalexand]

This is a blog post announcing that the new "Profiles" OpenTelemetry signal has reached Alpha stage 🎉

Fixes #9392.

• 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

Footnotes

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

[tiffany76]

Looking pretty good! I left a few copy edits and as I explained in my comment, we'll need you to remove the devfiler backend content from the Getting Started section.

Thanks.

[aalexand]

Addressed the comments except the devfiler one as it's being discussed.

@tiffany76 Curious - is there a best known method to deal with the refcache.json conflicts? Delete and regenerate? Is it the "check:links" action that regenerates it? Thanks!

[tiffany76]

Curious - is there a best known method to deal with the refcache.json conflicts? Delete and regenerate? Is it the "check:links" action that regenerates it? Thanks!

If it's not a major conflict, you can try to resolve it directly. But yes, it might be easier to remove the file from the PR and then run npm run fix:refcache on an updated branch. The file changes will automatically be added and you can push them up.

[aalexand]

@tiffany76 I'm applying these last fixes and will update the PR shortly.

A quick question on the publication date and time: If I set the date field in the frontmatter to March 26 like now, the post won't show on the site until March 26 as far as I understand, correct? If yes, do you know at what time will it get published?

Our time of interest is Thursday, March 26, 2026, 15:15 – 15:45 CET (which s 07:15 – 07:45 AM PDT). I assume there is no way to configure exact publication time.

[aalexand]

@tiffany76 I think I addressed all comments and the CI checks are green. The only open question is the publication time handling, see my other comment above. Thanks for all the help, I really appreciate it!

[tiffany76]

A quick question on the publication date and time: If I set the date field in the frontmatter to March 26 like now, the post won't show on the site until March 26 as far as I understand, correct? If yes, do you know at what time will it get published?

If we merge now or anytime before March 26, the blog post will go live with the first website build after midnight UTC. We don't typically use this method, because we like to add social media promotion around the time we publish the post.

Our time of interest is Thursday, March 26, 2026, 15:15 – 15:45 CET (which s 07:15 – 07:45 AM PDT). I assume there is no way to configure exact publication time.

Correct, there's no way to configure an exact time. I'll actually be in Amsterdam next week, so one of my Comms colleagues who is not attending KubeCon will be the one to merge this post. I will let them know your targeted time frame, but we really cannot guarantee a publication time, unfortunately.

[felixge]

Thank you so much @tiffany76. @florianl and myself will also be at KubeCon to present the profiling alpha release.

We were hoping the post could be published during the talk. But of course we understand if it's not possible.

Anyway, on the off-chance that you might be able to be in the room during the presentation and hit the merge button, please let us know 🙇

[aalexand]

@felixge Regarding the merge while on stage - one thing with this PR is that I think it's prone to merge conflicts in refcache.json, this can be an unpleasant last second surprise.

[vitorvasc]

@aalexand, no worries about that! we can fix it by running the /fix:refcache command in the comments before we merge. :)

[felixge]

We just talked to @svrnm (who is at KubeCon) and he said he'd be able to merge the PR while we're giving the talk. So that's the plan 🤞