Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Tracing has become essential for monitoring today’s increasingly distributed architectures. But complex production applications produce an extremely high volume of traces, which are prohibitively expensive to store and nearly impossible to sift through in time-sensitive situations. Most traditional tracing solutions address these operational challenges by making sampling decisions before a request even begins its path through your system (i.e., head-based sampling).

Willy Tarreau, the founder of the HAProxy load balancer, 20 years past its initial, open-source release, still guides the project, often submitting code patches and writing long and meticulous replies on the community forum. Over the years, he has been joined by a cast of regular contributors, but also newcomers. This collaboration has kept the project evolving over time. In this interview, Willy describes his views on the success of the project, and how it grew over the years.

So you’ve just created a new project and want to start distributing it, but you still don’t know how to manage its deployment. Then there’s the monitoring, network request, and a lot of other problems related to modern apps. At the same time, you want to avoid working directly with AWS due to its intricacy.