opentelemetry-helm-charts VS traefik

Refer to the official documentation for the Helm chart for comprehensive instructions and configuration options: OpenTelemetry Helm Charts Documentation.

In my latest Nomadification Project (TM), I got the OpenTelemetry Demo App to run on Nomad (with HashiQube, of course). To do this, I used the OpenTelemetry Demo App Helm Chart as my guide. In doing this, and other Nomadifications, I realized that I’ve never gone through the process of explaining the conversion process from Kubernetes manifests to Nomad jobspecs.

Y’all...I’m so excited, because I finally got to work on an item on my tech bucket list. Last week, I began the process of translating OpenTelemetry (OTel) Demo App’s Helm Charts to HashiCorp Nomad job specs.

After creating a Kubernetes cluster, we needed to create a Kubernetes resource before we could apply the Helm chart to install the OpenTelemetry demo app. The Demo App’s Helm Chart deploys an OpenTelemetry Collector. We wanted to configure the Collector to send OTel data to Lightstep. To do so, you need to add a Lightstep Access Token, which is stored as a Kubernetes secret.

Deploy the OpenTelemetry Demo App using the OpenTelemetry Demo Helm Chart

Now let's dive right in and figure out how to use the Helm chart provided by OpenTelemetry.

However, it's very unlikely that .NET developers will directly expose their Kestrel-based web apps to the internet. Typically, we use other popular web servers like Nginx, Traefik, and Caddy to act as a reverse-proxy in front of Kestrel for various reasons:

Not as good though. Case in point: https://github.com/traefik/traefik/issues/5472#issuecomment-... (that's just from this morning)

I'm speak objectively here. Of course, any built-in auto HTTPS that works (more or less) is better than none. Traefik uses an ACME library that was originally written for Caddy. After the original author left that project, Traefik team started maintaining it. Caddy's users' requirements exceeded what the library was capable of, but unfortunately there was friction in getting it to achieve our requirements. So I ended up writing a new ACME client library in Go and, together with upgrades in CertMagic (Caddy's auto-TLS lib), Caddy has the more flexible, robust, and capable auto-HTTPS functionality.

That is to say, not all auto-HTTPS functionalities are the same.

We'll use Traefik, an open source cloud native gateway that can plug into a Kubernetes cluster. It has the concept of "middleware" that can process API requests before passing them through to a backend. We can configuring a rate limit for all of our API endpoints by matching on the request path:

I did the same question here and here

Sadly there is currently no way of doing so. https://github.com/traefik/traefik/issues/6999

Traefik is another widely used system that has automatic configuration and offers support for more things like swarm/kubernetes/etc.

I have a webapp which I currently have deployed by running nginx in a container. Works as it should, however I am intersted in adding more observability to the webapp and found this reverse-proxy https://github.com/traefik/traefik which seems to expose some nice metrics which can be useful for observability.

``` more details in this (github issue)[https://github.com/traefik/traefik/issues/5059]