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Instrumentation Ecosystem Management (open-telemetry#155)
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# Ecosystem Management | ||
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Proposal how to leverage wider community contributing instrumentations and other packages. | ||
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## Motivation | ||
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For OpenTelemetry to become a de-facto standard in observability there must exist a vast ecosystem of OpenTelemetry components, | ||
including integrations with various libraries and frameworks in all languages supported by OpenTelemetry. | ||
We cannot possibly expect that all these integrations will be provided by the core maintainers of OpenTelemetry. | ||
We hope that wider community will integrate their projects with OpenTelemetry. | ||
We have to encourage that by providing great documentation, examples and tooling to integration authors, | ||
while still providing our end-users with some way to discover all available OpenTelemetry components together with some visibility into their quality. | ||
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## Explanation | ||
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The [OpenTelemetry Registry](https://opentelemetry.io/registry/) serves as a central catalogue of all known OpenTelemetry components, | ||
both provided by core maintainers of the project and any third party. | ||
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In order for a component to be included into Registry its authors have to fill a [self-assessment form](#registry-self-assessment-form). | ||
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The registry should allow a clear visibility of component's ownership, quality and compatibility with other OpenTelemetry components. | ||
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A component can be removed from the Registry if any declaration from the self-assessment form is violated and not remedied | ||
in a timely manner, provisionally three or four weeks. | ||
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## Internal details | ||
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We distinguish the following sources of OpenTelemetry components and integrations. | ||
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### Native or built-in instrumentations | ||
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Any library or framework can use the OpenTelemetry API to natively produce telemetry. | ||
We encourage library authors to submit their library for inclusion into the OpenTelemetry Registry. | ||
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### Core components | ||
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OpenTelemetry SIGs may provide instrumentation for any libraries that are deemed important enough by the SIG’s maintainers. | ||
By doing this the SIG maintainers commit to support this instrumentation (including future versions of the library), | ||
provide updates/fixes, including security patches and guarantee that they comply with OpenTelemetry semantic conventions and best practices. | ||
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Depending on the SIG, these instances of core instrumentation may share the repository, infrastructure and maintainers with | ||
the OpenTelemetry API/SDK implementation for this language or be separate. | ||
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All instances of core instrumentation must be included into the OpenTelemetry Registry following the usual process described above. | ||
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### Contrib components | ||
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Any language SIG may have one or more “contrib” repos containing components contributed by developers with an interest in specific parts of the instrumentation ecosystem. | ||
These repositories may have a separate set of approvers/maintainers than the core API/SDK repo. | ||
Contrib repositories are as important for the project success as core repository, but may not require the same level of expertise. | ||
In fact, these repositories often calls for other set of skills and customer's understanding. | ||
On contrib repository creation, new set of approvers and maintainers can be added as we do for any new repository, without time/contribution requirements. | ||
Repository maintainers are also encouraged to promote contributors to approver/maintainer role in this repository | ||
based on targeted contributions and expertise of the contrib repository rather than overall SIG scope. | ||
It is important to keep the process fair and inclusive by following the formal guidance published [here](https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/blob/main/community-membership.md#maintainer). | ||
A contrib repository may leverage the CODEOWNERS functionality of GitHub to assign maintainers to individual packages | ||
even if this means granting write permissions to the whole repo. | ||
The goal should be to distribute the load of reviewing PRs and accepting changes as much as possible, while keeping reliability and overall quality of components and fair governance. | ||
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All components in a contrib repository are expected to be included into the OpenTelemetry Registry following the usual process described above. | ||
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We should welcome all contributions and make the inclusion process (including following all our requirements) as easy as possible. | ||
The goal is to encourage all contributors to include their components into a contrib repo as opposed to hosting them separately. | ||
This way they can reuse existing infrastructure for testing, publishing, security scanning etc. | ||
This will also greatly simplify responsibility transfer between different maintainers if their priorities change. | ||
It also promotes the development and maintenance of a single instrumentation package for each instrumentation source, | ||
so that work isn't spread amongst multiple parallel solutions. | ||
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Language SIGs are encouraged to provide a testing harness to verify that component adheres to OpenTelemetry semantic conventions | ||
and recommendations for OpenTelemetry instrumentations design when OpenTelemetry starts publishing them. | ||
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A high volume of contrib contributions presents a burden for language maintainers. There are two suggestions for tackling this: | ||
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- Create an "experimental" folder within contrib. The contents of this folder are not reviewed or maintained by language repository maintainers, but | ||
many of the other benefits of being within a contrib repository remain. | ||
Experimental contributions should be marked as such in the Registry. | ||
- Add more approvers and maintainers, perhaps some who exclusively focus on submissions to contrib. | ||
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### External components | ||
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If component authors, for whatever reason, want to host their contribution outside an OpenTelemetry contrib repository | ||
they are free to do so (though we encourage all contributions to go into contrib or core language repositories). | ||
Their submission for inclusion into OpenTelemetry Registry is still welcomed, subject to the same process described above. | ||
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### Distribution | ||
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Whenever OpenTelemetry components are published to any repository other than the OpenTelemetry Registry (such as npm registry or Maven Central), | ||
only core and contrib components can be published under "opentelemetry" namespace. | ||
Native and external components are to be published under their own namespace. | ||
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In case the OpenTelemetry SIG provides any kind of "all-in-one" instrumentation distribution (e.g. as Java and .NET do) | ||
their should be an option to get a distribution with only core and contrib packages included. | ||
The OpenTelemetry Registry should provide a way to easily obtain a list of these components. | ||
The SIG may provide other distributions as well. | ||
If possible, SIGs should provide a mechanism to include any external component during target application's build- or runtime. | ||
This may mean a separate language-specific component API that all components are encouraged to implement. | ||
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## Trade-offs and mitigations | ||
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* How easy it is to get merge permission in contrib repo? | ||
The harder it is, the larger is the maintenance burden on the core team. | ||
The easier it is, the more uncertainty there is about the quality of contributions. | ||
Can every language SIG decide this for themselves or should we decide together? | ||
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## Open questions | ||
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### Registry self-assessment form | ||
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The exact list should be developed separately, but at least the component's author should declare that | ||
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* It uses permissive OSS license approved by CNCF | ||
* It does not have any known security vulnerabilities | ||
* It produces telemetry which adheres to OpenTelemetry semantic conventions | ||
* If the OpenTelemetry/SIG provides a testing harness to verify produced telemetry, that tests were used and passed | ||
* Authors commit a reasonable effort into future maintenance of this component | ||
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### Component information in the Registry | ||
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The exact UI of component's page in the Registry is outside of this OTEP's scope, but some suggestions are: | ||
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* Short description of the component | ||
* Link to the original repository of this component | ||
* Clear indication of component's authors/maintainers and its OpenTelemetry status (native/core/contrib/external) | ||
* License used | ||
* Language and targeted library | ||
* Links to a list of current issues and known security vulnerabilities | ||
* Some way of component's quality as perceived by its users, e.g. rating or stars or thumbs up/down | ||
* OpenTelemetry API/SDK and library versions that this component was tested against | ||
* If OpenTelemetry verification harness is used by this component | ||
* A filled self-assessment form | ||
* Any quality indicators we may want to standardize on (e.g. test coverage) | ||
* Dev stats (date of creation, date of last release, date of last commit) |