Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are the comments I come here for. I was reading this and dreaded the lock-in. Thanks for pointing out sane alternatives!
My masters thesis is X-trace derived, as well as a paper we published at ICPE a few years ago. I'm on mobile so don't have a link handy. You can probably guess my name from my username.
AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System
81–90 of 104 posts
Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System
#82If 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…
And if you're curious about how this sort of thing could look on the client/browser side of things, check out https://opbeat.com/react (I work on it)
Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System
#83If 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…
Stackdriver Trace [1] is Google's external implementation of Dapper with additional analysis features. It's available for free, even for workloads not running on Google Cloud Platform. (Disclosure: I work on it) [1]: https://cloud.google.com/trace/
Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System
#84Turns out X-Ray is sampling service, it drops data. You can use it to debug recurring problems, but it's no use when debugging a particular incident with the customer on the phone. Bummer. To provide a performant and cost-effective experience, X-Ray does not collect data for every request that is sent to an application. Instead, it collects data for a statistically significant number of requests. X-Ray should not be…
Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know there's no obligation to invest in services that don't make money, so please don't take this as some kind of expectation of that. A dedicated team doesn't always mean there's an equal distribution of quality and innovation. You can have a dedicated team that's so small they only have time to do bug fixes or a team with less talent/experience because everyone wants to move to teams working on the projects with…
TBH I think you have a point there: the hot new thing is serverless and lambda so everyone I know really wants to work on those teams. I see where you're coming from for sure. There are still a lot of talented and passionate people at Amazon who want to execute on other products. The S3 team is still growing 10 years later and they're still doing (IMO) cool stuff. I'm a devangelist though so I don't always get to see…
Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who writes AGPL software, I will say to most of us it isn't a downside: I would conceptialize that scenario as "your loss" and hope that my work helps give companies who are more friendly to the idea of community software at least a little bit of a competitive advantage over your company. In all seriousness: if you are intending to not contribute changes back (which is the only legitimate reason to avoid G…
The worry, places I've worked, is that the GPL would spread to proprietary stuff, like a kind of legal infection. They worry that if they use an AGPL javascript library for the video player on their front page, they'll have to opensource the whole web application (I've even sat in on debates over weather using GPL3 programs means you have to opensource any source data you use them to process and publish the result).…
Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who writes AGPL software, I will say to most of us it isn't a downside: I would conceptialize that scenario as "your loss" and hope that my work helps give companies who are more friendly to the idea of community software at least a little bit of a competitive advantage over your company. In all seriousness: if you are intending to not contribute changes back (which is the only legitimate reason to avoid G…
Totally agree that it is indeed "our loss". No argument there. I don't want to appear a kook, so I won't relitigate what I said in another reply. But essentially we do want to give back. We just aren't always able to give back everything (at least not right now). AGPL, like GPL, is all or nothing in that way. I don't get the option of giving back something, then giving back more later (OSS is threatening to some peop…
Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System
#88Turns out X-Ray is sampling service, it drops data. You can use it to debug recurring problems, but it's no use when debugging a particular incident with the customer on the phone. Bummer. To provide a performant and cost-effective experience, X-Ray does not collect data for every request that is sent to an application. Instead, it collects data for a statistically significant number of requests. X-Ray should not be…
The service works via the SDK's in various languages, that report tracing information to a local daemon that runs on the host, over UDP.
The daemon then batches the data, applies sampling (Which is configurable, all the way to 100% - report everything), and sends it en-masse to AWS.
Edit: See Sampling Rules section here - http://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/latest/devguide/xray-sdk-nod...
Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System
#89I 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.
Part of it is the cereal business model. You introduce more flavors not because they are going to sell well or to increase volume, but just to take shelf space at the supermarket away from your competitors. In this case the shelf space is mindshare, media coverage and "feature coverage" in researcher's market comparisons.
Re: AWS X-Ray – Distributed Tracing System
#90If 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…