Company
Date Published
Author
Rosemary Wang
Word count
2118
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Tracing .NET Applications with Consul's Service Mesh allows developers to bridge the gap between workloads and enable distributed tracing for applications running .NET or .NET Core frameworks. This enables enriched traces with service metadata such as IP addresses or versions without declaring annotations within application code. By leveraging a set of ASP.NET Core services, tracing is implemented using proxies to pass tracing metadata and record requests. Tracing libraries such as zipkin4net are used for the Zipkin tracing system or OpenTracing specification for Jaeger tracing system. Consul's service mesh capability can be used to control traffic between legacy and greenfield .NET applications by deploying a proxy sidecar with each service, automatically registering services into Consul. This enables developers to shape traffic and troubleshoot requests between different versions of their services using distributed tracing. Additionally, Consul supports Envoy 1.11.1 which must use the Zipkin span format, and uses a service-splitter configuration file to divert traffic between two subsets of expense, namely version 1 and version 2. By applying a service-splitter, developers can control how much traffic they send to a new version of a service, ensuring its production readiness through gradual canary releases or A/B testing based on HTTP headers.