July 2026 Summaries

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a comprehensive set of APIs, libraries, and services designed for capturing distributed traces and metrics, which is particularly advantageous for microservices and serverless architectures due to its standard-based telemetry data collection. Supported by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, OTel is rapidly becoming the preferred standard among platform engineers and DevOps professionals, offering a unified API for instrumentation and interoperability across various infrastructure components. Axiom enhances the power of OTel by capturing data at full fidelity without conversion or sampling, allowing for seamless query transformation through its APL language, which is designed to be more intuitive than traditional SQL. This empowers non-technical team members, such as product managers, to perform their own queries without requiring engineering support. Axiom's pricing model starts at $25 per month, ensuring cost-effective access to OTel capabilities without unexpected expenses.

The text discusses the Gorilla algorithm, initially developed by Facebook for time series caching and storage, highlighting its simplicity and effectiveness in handling monotonically increasing timestamps and float-only, append-only data. While Gorilla has become a standard, it presents challenges in multi-tenant deployments, particularly with out-of-order data and integer support. The author describes an alternative approach that introduces two buffers (compressed and uncompressed) to manage out-of-order data and employs a bitmap for time storage, which improves compression efficiency over Gorilla's delta-of-delta method. This new method, compatible with both integers and floats, trades some CPU efficiency for better memory and storage management, achieving a significant reduction in storage size while being slightly less memory efficient. The approach is tailored to handle both floats and integers, addressing shortcomings in Gorilla's handling of data types and order, ultimately providing a net win in storage efficiency despite increased CPU usage.