For hardware management maybe but so much of "observability" in general is at the application layer I can't see BPF displacing anything more than a tiny corner of it.
On the other hand - it already is overhauling service meshes, VPNs and firewalls and network security policies, etc. The stuff fly.io is debuting now is probably going to be standard in few years.
Strongly disagree. BPF uprobes allow extremely fine grained tracing of userspace applications, and allow you to programmatically correlate them with kernel level information.
Sure, but "fine-grained tracing" is itself such a small part of observability even if BPF takes over that entire part of the stack it's still nowhere near a complete observability story.
This is outside my area of expertise so maybe I'm just missing some deeper insight - and I can see where you're coming from for traditional "throw the artifact over the wall, good luck running it" system operations kind of stuff. Or debugging services in production, which tracing is a key part of - but again just a small part of observability, and one that the rest of your dev process should be actively trying to minimize. If you have any degree of DevOps going on, many key SLIs will much higher-level (p99 of HTTP requests, MB of storage per customer), and I don't see how eBPF addresses that better than existing instrumentation, or in some cases at all.
On the other hand - it already is overhauling service meshes, VPNs and firewalls and network security policies, etc. The stuff fly.io is debuting now is probably going to be standard in few years.