March 2022 Summaries

OpenTelemetry is an open-source project that provides standardized APIs and libraries for collecting, transferring, and analyzing telemetry data. It helps to make systems more observable by providing a way to collect logs, metrics, and traces in a distributed system. Traces expose the entire journey of an action or request as it moves across all services in the system, while context propagation is used to send context from service to service to follow the execution flow. OpenTelemetry has several benefits, including vendor agnosticism, cross-platform support, automatic and manual instrumentation, clean architecture with separation of concerns, and production-ready version 1.0 released in March 2021. Instrumentation involves adding traces and spans code to an application, which can be done manually or using auto-instrumentation agents. OpenTelemetry is composed of API, SDK, and collectors, with the latter being optional but allowing for sending data to different backends without redeploying applications. AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry provides upstream-first, AWS-supported distribution of the project with enhancements such as SDKs for X-Ray trace format and context, and exporters to AWS services like CloudWatch and X-Ray. Enabling OpenTelemetry for a Lambda function is straightforward, involving adding an ARN, specifying environment variables, and configuring the layer.

The Lambda function now offers the ability to configure its ephemeral storage, which is a directory that provides fast I/O throughput and can be reused across multiple invocations for the same instance of a Lambda function. This feature allows developers to increase the size of this directory from 512MB to up to 10GB, providing more space for tasks such as unzipping files or cloning Git repositories. The change is available through various configuration methods, including CloudFormation, AWS CLI, and AWS SDK, but does not affect the deployment package limit of Lambda functions. The new feature also differs from using EFS (Elastic File System), which provides a network file system with higher latency and data sharing capabilities, making it suitable for different use cases and characteristics.