Live data from Hacker News

AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System

aws.amazon.com

11–20 of 104 posts

Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System

#13

I haven't used many of the new AWS services. Someone tell me, what's the quality level? I'll be surprised if all the new AWS stuff works that well given how divided their focus must be now.

(I WORK FOR AWS) Each service has it's own dedicated service team. I've used some (not all) of the new services and I believe there is room to improve but I didn't think they were unstable or anything like that.

Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System

#14
Looks like it doesn't support all languages. Not sure if users can contribute plugins.

> You can use X-Ray with applications written in Java, Node.js, and .NET that are deployed on these services. Support for AWS Lambda is coming soon.

Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System

#16
If you're interested in distributed system tracing there's a lot going on.

As a starting point, I would recommend reading Google's paper on their project "Dapper." [1] It's essentially the core of most distributed tracing systems. At least those I've encountered.

There's a lot of tooling out there that take their cues from Dapper. I've recently been looking into integrating OpenZipkin[2] with our systems. I see at as a more viable alternative (no tie in!) to Yet Another Propriety Thing in AWS (YAPTA). There's other as well, like AppDash.

Recently there has been a push towards an open-standard for the collection side called OpenTracing[3]. I came across it when investigating LightStep[4]. Ideally that means no vendor lock-in, which of course has lots of knock-on effects.

If you know of any, I'd love to be pointed in the direction of _different_ and not just divergent techniques.

[1]: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

[2]: http://zipkin.io

[3]: http://opentracing.io

[4]: http://lightstep.com - Impressive team behind this.

Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System

#19

I haven't used many of the new AWS services. Someone tell me, what's the quality level? I'll be surprised if all the new AWS stuff works that well given how divided their focus must be now.

You say that like their quality doesn't suffer today because of how divided their focus has been in the past :)

AWS's crustiness is exactly what I would expect from an agglomeration of adversarial teams each looking to minimize their own liability at the expense of everyone else. Given that they're still organized that way, the surprise would be if they turned the trend around, not if it continued.

Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System

#20

I haven't used many of the new AWS services. Someone tell me, what's the quality level? I'll be surprised if all the new AWS stuff works that well given how divided their focus must be now.

It depends, but the quality is often MVP level. Some new services are introduced but then virtually abandoned or developed at a snail's pace (Service Catalog, ECS). Sometimes I wish they'd spend more time making the core awesome instead of constantly introducing new services.
Post reply on HN