Photo by Michael Schiffer on Unsplash
OpenTelemetry (OTel) has been on my radar for a while, but learning it has been too daunting a task to start. I recently had the opportunity (read: no escape) when it came time to instrument our applications at Immerok.
This week's post is a grab bag of places on the internet that I've found helpful for connecting with communities. There are so many tools out there, how are you supposed to use them all without breaking anything? I haven't figured that out yet — when I'm really stuck, or have an idea to make something better, getting in touch, joining a zoom, etc. with the people who make the tool has been the most effective and rewarding way to unstick.
Last time we took a look at SQL, one of the most popular declarative APIs, and imagined what it would look like if identifiers were controlled by the system instead of the user, e.g. you must look up the identifier for a table in order to add records to it.
This was inconvenient, but workable within the sequential context of SQL execution. Now, let's use a less contrived example to see how it extends to control plane APIs, where forcing sequential execution makes modeling workflows complex and frankly just not fun.
Gwen Shapira of The Nile recently shared some interesting discussions on what people use for the IDs in their systems. Most advocate for (or against at all costs!) one format or another, citing the technical pains and trade-offs.
For control planes (and cloud service APIs, more generally), IDs are how you address the API objects in the system. In healthy systems, users are creating and interacting with objects all the time.