As I sat down, I realised I was sitting beside Pat Kenny and his wife Kathy. Pat is one of Ireland’s most famous TV broa

“A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health,” writes Tony Schwartz of The New York Times.,On the day I heard it, I found myself sitting in a busy coffee shop in Dublin City centre. There were no seats anywhere so I asked a couple if I could sit at the end of their 6-seater table. They kindly said yes.,I recently extended this habit after reaching out to one of my favourite thought leaders, Adam Robinson. Adam suggests we should ‘lean into every moment and encounter expecting magic and miracles.’ What a way to live.,Our chaos engineering team uses traces to verify that failures are correctly injected while our engineers stress test their microservices via Failure Injection Testing (FIT) platform.,While we have made substantial progress, we are now at another inflection point in building our trace data storage system. Onboarding new user experiences on Edgar could require us to store 10x the amount of current data volume. As a result, we are currently experimenting with a tiered storage approach for a new data gateway. This data gateway provides a querying interface that abstracts the complexity of reading and writing data from tiered data stores. Additionally, the data gateway routes ingested data to the Cassandra cluster and transfers compacted data files from Cassandra cluster to S3. We plan to retain the last few hours worth of data in Cassandra clusters and keep the rest in S3 buckets for long term retention of traces.,We were adding new Cassandra nodes whenever the EC2 SSD instance stores of existing nodes reached maximum storage capacity. The use of a cheaper EBS Elastic volume instead of an SSD instance store was an attractive option because AWS allows dynamic increase in EBS volume size without re-provisioning the EC2 node. This allowed us to increase total storage capacity without adding a new Cassandra node to the existing cluster. In 2019 our stunning colleagues in the Cloud Database Engineering (CDE) team benchmarked EBS performance for our use case and migrated existing clusters to use EBS Elastic volumes. By optimizing the Time Window Compaction Strategy (TWCS) parameters, they reduced the disk write and merge operations of Cassandra SSTable files, thereby reducing the EBS I/O rate. This optimization helped us reduce the data replication network traffic amongst the cluster nodes because SSTable files were created less often than in our previous configuration. Additionally, by enabling Zstd block compression on Cassandra data files, the size of our trace data files was reduced by half. With these optimized Cassandra clusters in place, it now costs us 71% less to operate clusters and we could store 35x more data than our previous configuration.,We are looking for stunning colleagues to join us on this journey of building distributed tracing infrastructure. If you are passionate about Observability then come talk to us.,Provide a great developer experience for collecting traces across all runtime environments. With an easy way to to try out distributed tracing, we hope that more engineers instrument their services with traces and provide additional context for each request by tagging relevant metadata.,As we progress in building distributed tracing infrastructure, our engineers continue to rely on Edgar for troubleshooting streaming issues like “Why doesn’t Tiger King play on my phone?”. Our distributed tracing infrastructure helps in ensuring that Netflix members continue to enjoy a must-watch show like Tiger King!,We are looking for stunning colleagues to join us on this journey of building distributed tracing infrastructure. If you are passionate about Observability then come talk to us.,In theory, scaling up horizontally would allow us to handle higher write rates and retain larger amounts of data in Cassandra clusters. This implies that the cost of storing traces grows linearly to the amount of data being stored. We needed to ensure storage cost growth was sub-linear to the amount of data being stored. In pursuit of this goal, we outlined following storage optimization strategies:,Trace data is a key signal used by Telltale in monitoring macro level application health at Netflix. Telltale uses the causal information from traces to infer microservice topology and correlate traces with time series data from Atlas. This approach paints a richer observability portrait of application health.,We observed that Edgar users explored less than 1% of collected traces. This insight leads us to believe that we can reduce write pressure and retain more data in the storage system if we drop traces that users will not care about. We currently use a simple rule based filter in our Storage Mantis job that retains interesting traces for very rarely looked service call paths in Edgar. The filter qualifies a trace as an interesting data point by inspecting all buffered spans of a trace for warnings, errors, and retry tags. This tail-based sampling approach reduced the trace data volume by 20% without impacting user experience. There is an opportunity to use machine learning based classification techniques to further reduce trace data volume.,The Demand Engineering team leverages tracing to improve the correctness of prescaling during regional evacuations. Traces provide visibility into the types of devices interacting with microservices such that changes in demand for these services can be better accounted for when an AWS region is evacuated.,We started with Elasticsearch as our data store due to its flexible data model and querying capabilities. As we onboarded more streaming services, the trace data volume started increasing exponentially. The increased operational burden of scaling ElasticSearch clusters due to high data write rate became painful for us. The data read queries took an increasingly longer time to finish because ElasticSearch clusters were using heavy compute resources for creating indexes on ingested traces. The high data ingestion rate eventually degraded both read and write operations. We solved this by migrating to Cassandra as our data store for handling high data ingestion rates. Using simple lookup indices in Cassandra gives us the ability to maintain acceptable read latencies while doing heavy writes.