Book Image

Mastering Distributed Tracing

By : Yuri Shkuro
Book Image

Mastering Distributed Tracing

By: Yuri Shkuro

Overview of this book

Mastering Distributed Tracing will equip you to operate and enhance your own tracing infrastructure. Through practical exercises and code examples, you will learn how end-to-end tracing can be used as a powerful application performance management and comprehension tool. The rise of Internet-scale companies, like Google and Amazon, ushered in a new era of distributed systems operating on thousands of nodes across multiple data centers. Microservices increased that complexity, often exponentially. It is harder to debug these systems, track down failures, detect bottlenecks, or even simply understand what is going on. Distributed tracing focuses on solving these problems for complex distributed systems. Today, tracing standards have developed and we have much faster systems, making instrumentation less intrusive and data more valuable. Yuri Shkuro, the creator of Jaeger, a popular open-source distributed tracing system, delivers end-to-end coverage of the field in Mastering Distributed Tracing. Review the history and theoretical foundations of tracing; solve the data gathering problem through code instrumentation, with open standards like OpenTracing, W3C Trace Context, and OpenCensus; and discuss the benefits and applications of a distributed tracing infrastructure for understanding, and profiling, complex systems.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Mastering Distributed Tracing
Contributors
Preface
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15
Afterword
Index

Service meshes


Service meshes have become increasingly popular in the past two-to-three years, as more and more organizations have embarked on the path of replacing the old monolithic applications with distributed architectures based on microservices. In Chapter 1, Why Distributed Tracing, we discussed the benefits and challenges of these transitions. As microservices-based applications grow in size and complexity, the communications between the services require more and more support from the infrastructure, to address problems like discovery, load balancing, rate limiting, failure recovery and retries, end-to-end authentication, access control, A/B testing, canary releases, and so on. Given a common trend in the industry, where different parts of distributed applications are often written in different programming languages, implementing all this infrastructure functionality as libraries, included in the individual services in every language, becomes intractable. We would much rather implement...