[HN Gopher] What Drop-In API Observability Looks Like, Pre-Launc...
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       What Drop-In API Observability Looks Like, Pre-Launch and Post-
       Launch
        
       Author : cpeterso
       Score  : 47 points
       Date   : 2022-06-29 21:32 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.akitasoftware.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.akitasoftware.com)
        
       | steelaz wrote:
       | This is cool product, but but I don't undersatand this statement:
       | 
       |  _" Importantly, Akita did not impact processing loss or extra
       | costs inside AWS, a main concern at our company stage."_
       | 
       | Author specifically talks about AWS Fargate and links to Akita
       | docs where it says in AWS Fargate setup, Akita agent should run
       | as a side car in each container you deploy. How can that not
       | bring significant amount of extra compute cost?
        
         | ebbp wrote:
         | Not from the company but we do something similar with
         | opentelemetry. It's true, because you pay for the total
         | allocation of CPU/memory on Fargate, so you can add a sidecar
         | container into that total allocation with a small deduction
         | from the amount left available to the app itself. E.g. Before:
         | 512MB for task, 512MB available for the application After:
         | 512MB for task, 412MB available for the application, 100MB
         | available for sidecar
        
           | steelaz wrote:
           | Yes, but even in your example, that's 20% of resources going
           | to the sidecar. Not to mention sizing correctly multiple
           | containers in a single task gets complicated.
        
         | jeanyang wrote:
         | Hello, this is Jean from Akita. You're right that running Akita
         | as a sidecar does incurs extra compute. Whether or not this
         | incurs extra cost on Fargate depends on whether it's necessary
         | to switch to a larger instance. In zMatch's case, the answer is
         | no. In general, it depends on how much traffic you're sending
         | through Akita.
         | 
         | Something to point out is that Akita passively watches traffic
         | and doesn't sit in the path of traffic, so there's no impact on
         | latency, unless the task is at 100% CPU utilization.
        
         | markgritter wrote:
        
       | digb wrote:
       | _" Almost immediately after installation, Akita provided all the
       | endpoints' requirements, as well as some examples of expected
       | values, which allowed us to better understand the service that
       | the contractors had built. Once we could understand the data flow
       | (including not only the request body, but also headers and
       | authorization), improving the system became a lot easier. After
       | we had the mapping,"_
       | 
       | Interesting... could be cool to see a value-add service on top of
       | Akita or another Obs vendor that just inspects req/res payloads
       | and generates OpenAPI specs based off what was observed. I can't
       | count how many times I've dropped into teams and tried to piece
       | together their API contracts just to realize... they don't have
       | specs! Having to then turn around and reconstruct them backwards
       | based off code spelunking and maybe some design docs is...
       | frustrating.
        
         | kgilpin wrote:
         | Hi, I'm creator of a tool called AppMap that will record traces
         | of your code (test cases or live interaction). Once you've made
         | AppMaps there are different tools you use on top of it, such as
         | visualization and analysis, and extensions for VSCode and
         | JetBrains.
         | 
         | One of the tools is openapi generation. Here's a blog post that
         | shows how it works: https://appland.com/blog/2021/12/22/how-to-
         | auto-generate-ope...
         | 
         | AppMap works with Rails, Django, Java, and JS/Express. Check it
         | out and let us know what you think!
        
         | ndimares wrote:
         | I see a lot of value in being able to generate the schema based
         | off of real time traffic, vs. static analysis or test cases. In
         | my mind the traffic to the API is the real source of truth for
         | the API.
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-01 23:01 UTC)