dmicher

This blog post is aimed at GoLang developers who are looking to improve the observability of their services. It skips the basics and jumps straight to advanced topics, such as asynchronous structured logging, metrics with exemplars, tracing with TraceQL, aggregating pprof and continuous profiling, microbenchmarks and basic statistics with benchstat, blackbox performance tests, and basic PID controllers for determining a system's maximum load. We'll also briefly touch on current research in the observability space, including active casual profiling and passive critical section detection.

Here is a great example of how Dropbox and Microsoft engineering collaboration lead to the great outcome: boosting upload speed for both Dropbox and Windows Server.

As a business that delivers our products through a global network of data centers, we are committed to sourcing the energy for our operations from 100% renewable energy sources.

Shipping cycle is one of the reasons mentioned. And as you can imaging, unfortunately, contributing to Nginx open source is not an easy thing (but they have a great product for sure). If HAProxy is different in terms of contributions - it is great!

There are different paths companies take. Some buy and it really works for them and their business, since overhead is small and everything just works. The other set of companies have more sophisticated requirements: when they want to have full control on what is going on, understand what the code is doing to better optimize everything else around it, faster shipping cycles and being able to implement what you want with out waiting for the next shipping cycle with commercial software, community and knowledge base around it etc.

I value your opinion.

I'm not declaring that C++ is better for everything. In our case it is better because it makes this part of the infrastructure more sustainable: there are more engineers who can code well in C++ vs C in our company and industry overall. Also it is easier to code in C++ as it is general purpose programming language with a lot of libraries available, open source projects, community around it etc.

When we are comparing C, Lua (Nginx) and C++ (Envoy). Yes C++ is better :).

Sadly, it would probably be as hard to maintain as an opensource version. We really want to have access to the code to make sure we can fix, troubleshoot it, understand it fast...

Things that may've help:

-- Configuration definition (e.g. protobufs.)

-- More focus on observability: error metrics (instead of logs), tracing, etc.

-- gRPC control plane.

-- C++ module development SDK.

-- (ideally) bazel.

Some dataplane features like gRPC JSON transcoding, gRPC-Web, and http/2 to backends.