OpenTelemetry Monthly Update: January 2020

Contributors have returned back from the holidays and progress on OpenTelemetry is accelerating into the new year.

This month’s update captures activity since Kubecon San Diego, which took place in San Diego at the end of last December. If you’re looking to get caught up about our presence at Kubecon, Sergey wrote a great summary that you can read here.

Marching Towards Beta

We’re aiming to provide a beta release of core OpenTelemetry components in mid March. Specifically, our goal is to release versions of the Java, JavaScript, Go, Python, and .Net SDKs, and Collector that fully implement the 0.3 / 0.4 versions of the specification. These beta releases aim to provide stable versions of the API that will allow an easy transition to their v1.0 successors.

The technical committee members and myself are currently surveying the progress of each SIG, filing issues for every work item that needs to be completed for beta, and tying these to GitHub milestones so that we can generate SIG-specific workback plans. Myself, Carlos, Bogdan, Sergey, and Yuri will be checking in periodically with each SIG throughout the beta development process.

While we haven’t completed check-ins with every single SIG yet, the ones that we’ve met are on track for beta.

Kubecon Amsterdam

Speaking of March, Kubecon EU is coming soon and OpenTelemetry will once again have a big presence. In the span of one year we’ll have progressed from Ben and I performing a surprise stage announcement to hosting a variety of talks hosted by contributors, vendors, and end users!

More details about our presence can be found here, and OpenTelemetry will also be a big topic at the observability day zero event that’s currently being planned (expect to hear more about this later).

SIG Updates

These updates were captured during last week’s community meeting. If you want to join the monthly community meetings, you can find details on the shared community calendar (web, gCal, iCal). Full notes from every community meeting are available here.

• All outstanding OTeps related to metrics and context propagation have been merged, which should unblock SIGs from developing these SDK features while the final specs are written. The global initialization OTep is still in need of review, so please comment on it.
• The Collector development team has made significant progress on productionization efforts, including end to end tests, deeper semantic versioning, and automatic publishing to DockerHub.
• Java, JavaScript, Node, Python, .Net, and Go have made significant progress on the metrics SDK, though most still need to implement aggregations. Metrics has been one of the biggest beta blockers and it’s great to see this progress!
• Ruby and Erlang have made significant progress on tracing, metrics, and context propagation. I’ll check in with these SIGs to see if there’s a chance for them to make the same beta date as the other languages.

The Java auto instrumentation continues to gain more members and is in the process of converting their functionality to the OpenTelemetry Java API. If you’re interested in joining this rapidly-growing SIG, feel free to pop in to their weekly meetings (web, gCal, iCal).