How to transparently migrate 300+ services to OpenTelemetry
In this talk, Dan will share some details of how tracing is implemented and auto-configured at Skyscanner via common config libraries, how this helped them to easily migrate from X-Ray to OpenTracing and Lightstep years ago, and how it now allowed them to transparently migrate to OpenTelemetry with zero impact on tracing or context propagation, and with minimal developer effort.
Migrating over 300 Java, Python and Node services, owned by multiple teams, from OpenTracing to OpenTelemetry presented a few challenges. These included minimising the asks from service owners, or making sure that context could still be propagated between services that had migrated and services that hadn’t. Combining the use of OpenTracing shims, multiple trace context propagators, and OpenTelemetry Collectors, they managed to provide engineers a minimal friction migration path. Dan will also share how OpenTelemetry paved the way to multiple improvements in their instrumentation libraries, which can now benefit from well-supported auto-instrumentation and future-proof APIs while they remaining vendor agnostic.
More about Daniel Gomez Blanco
Dan is a Principal Engineer at Skyscanner, leading their observability transformation to ensure travellers get a reliable and performant experience when booking their next holiday. He’s a big advocate of open standards and CNCF projects like OpenTelemetry to back the instrumentation and collection of telemetry data. He has worked both in big and small companies and institutions, from CERN to SKIPJAQ, always building software and infrastructure to reduce the cognitive load associated with supporting production services.