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codereflection

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I understand what the author is saying, but vendor lock-in with closed-source observability platforms is a significant challenge, especially for large organizations. When you instrument hundreds or thousands of applications with a specific tool, like the Datadog Agent, disentangling from that tool becomes nearly impossible without a massive investment of engineering time. In the Platform Engineering professional services space, we see this problem frequently. Enterprises are growing tired of big observability platform lock-in, especially when it comes to Datadog's opaque nature of your spend on their products, for example.

One of the promises of OTEL is that it allows organizations to replace vendor-specific agents with OTEL collectors, allowing the flexibility of the end observability platform. When used with an observability pipeline (such as EdgeDelta or Cribl), you can re-process collected telemetry data and send it to another platform, like Splunk, if needed. Consequently, switching from one observability platform to another becomes a bit less of a headache. Ironically, even Splunk recognizes this and has put substantial support behind the OTEL standard.

OTEL is far from perfect, and maybe some of these goals are a bit lofty, but I can say that many large organizations are adopting OTEL for these reasons.

Palantir S-1 6 years ago

My employer was a customer of theirs for a few years. Horrible service, our support pushed down in favor of their government contracts, etc. Grapevine says that they do some pretty shady stuff for the gov as well.

JFrog S-1 6 years ago

That's not necessarily true. Helm is a way to install things, it is not a replacement for an artifact store. Binaries are still required. Besides, not everything can be containerized. In the finance industry that I work in, we do push k8s a lot, but regardless, there are still many things that simply cannot just be pushed to containers without serious re-writes. Artifactory is a lifesaver for us, especially when it comes to handling proxy servers for library repos (npm, nuget, rubygems, etc).

True, however they are worth the price. I used various brands of LED bulbs for a long time (such as Cree), basically whatever Home Depot was selling. The failure rate was extremely high. In 2017 I switched to Philips LED bulbs, and just last night the first one failed. Overall they are worth the extra up front cost, they'll save you money in the long run.

That's awesome. We have so much customization around TeamCity that moving away from it doesn't make sense, but we're starting to look at the CI runners for other things, along with the k8s integration, all great stuff in GitLab. Yeah, the DevOps name though, it's unfortunate. DevOps is a culture, not a thing, product, tool, or process. Seems more like calling it Auto CI/CD is more appropriate, maybe? Anyways, thanks for the response!

Tangential: Reading this _really_ makes me appreciate the extremely stable system my team has build internally with GitLab and TeamCity. Azure DevOps sounds extremely frustrating (besides the point that I cannot stand the name they gave this product, and GitLab made that same mistake with the Auto DevOps feature name).

Seattle does this for kids in middle school and high school. Each kid gets an Orca card for free (transit card that we use in the Seattle area). Lots of kids use them, even the kids who travel ~10 miles to get to their school. I know it's saved me a lot of money in gas and bus fare over the years with my kids getting this benefit. The only down side is that the cards are only good for during the school year.

This. We use Rancher within our data center, because configuring and managing k8s is not trivial. Rancher eases a lot of that pain for our small team.