Microservices surveyed from the future
I had not heard of LightStep before, so their blog post which imagines looking back from a future in which the microservice architectural model succeeded did its job on me effectively. LightStep seem mainly to provide a "multi-process tracing" solution based upon Yet Another Standard of which I had not yet heard, namely OpenTracing.
"Back in the early days of microservices, developers lost a lot of the visibility they were accustomed to having with monolithic applications. Suddenly it was no longer possible to just grep through a log file and find the root cause: now the answer was split up across log files on 100s of nodes and interleaved with 1000s of other requests. Only with the advent of multi-process tracing, aggregate critical path analysis, and smart fault injection could the behavior of a distributed application really be understood."
Looking at the OpenTracing GitHub it seems that there is good support for Go and Python which are my main areas of interest.
It turns out that there are quite a few distributed tracing frameworks, which ought not to come as a surprise. Some people are actively looking into using Twitter's one (zipkin) to debug RabbitMQ which is potentially very useful.
