OpenTelemetry (OTel), the emerging industry standard for application observability and distributed tracing across cloud-native and distributed architectures, is becoming an essential tool for Go developers. However, implementing OTel with Go to send data to observability platforms is hardly a straightforward process. At Helios, we’re on a mission to help as many teams as possible adopt distributed tracing.

In November 2022, our team here at Helios attended and sponsored KubeCon North America. Our motivations for being there were related to getting out the word about what Helios is doing to accelerate development velocity through microservices troubleshooting. Here we are at our booth: While there we also caught up with a number of the other folks attending the event. Here are a few of the key takeaways and trends we noticed.

Traditional software application infrastructure generally followed a monolithic pattern; one application connected to one database. Understanding what was going on inside the application itself was a simple proposition, with relevant logs and metrics all originating from the same source. When it came time to scale, the answer was to get a bigger server or to get more servers.

Third-party integrations are inevitable in development. Some functionality is outsourced as there is no need to develop something in-house that’s already working, while some integrations are performed to connect with the customer’s ecosystem to help them get their job done better.