There isn't much information about correlation. What are the state-of-the-art tools and techniques for observability in stateful use cases?
Let's take the example of an SFU-based video conferencing app, where user devices go through multiple API calls to join a session. Now imagine a user reports that they cannot see video from another participant. How can such problems be effectively traced?
Of course, I can manually filter logs and traces by the first user, then by the second user, and look at the signaling exchange and frontend/backend errors. But are there better approaches?
In good hands, any product development process works well; in bad hands, any product development process fails. It is not about processes, methodologies, or frameworks - it is about people and what people do.
> they basically disqualified themselves from the start by nerfing the "core" version so bad it was useless
Ran the core version for around 3 years in production for a smart city project. The company I worked for has been running it for around 6 years. Not sure what you are talking about. Of course, we would love to use features like stale replicas for exports. But this isn't something we absolutely need.
At large? As you can see, there is room for a community with a different view on that. My personal definition of an "open source license" is that, as the name implies, I can access the code, preferably without much gatekeeping (e.g., creating a free account in a private GitLab instance). And, to be honest, I prefer the BSL with an Additional Use Grant over any other license, because this is the most reliable option to ensure that the project has a future and won’t be abandoned because no one wants to invest their time for free.
You are welcome to choose that, but in my opinion, it isn't open source. I think open source should means anyone can contribute or take, and contributions are shared, without undue discrimination. Nobody is forced to work on the project, but if they are then they have to give the results of their work back to the common pool they took from. You have just as much power to keep the project going as anyone else does, including the current "maintainer".
+1. It even looks very similar to TypeScript. Why not use TypeScript as a description of APIs in the first place? Get TypeScript types and even generate OpenAPI schema on the fly to serve it at `/openapi`?
Typescript is too powerful, there are a lot of typescript constructs that can't be represented in OpenAPI specs. Or that could generate massively complex OpenAPI specs that would bring your tooling performance to a crawl.
A subset of typescript could work, but I imagine it would be fairly confusing to support some features here and other features there.
I think they are going for a minimum common denominator approach and eventually add other targets besides OpenAPI.
The solutions you are talking about are called "code-first", TypeSpec is a "schema-first" solution. Both solutions have their pros and cons:
Code-first:
- No extra steps between code and running application
- No mismatch between schema and code
- Requires tooling for every language used in your stack. This tooling is usually more complex than schema-first codegen, but it is almost always built-into and core of the backend framework you are using so it tends to be better supported.
- Requires teams to know each service's backend language to propose changes
- Harder to build a coherent central API documentation if you have multiple services. Requires complex tooling for merging the different schemas from the different services
Schema first:
- Schema first means contract-first design, scales better to products with multiple separate teams using multiple languages. It is easier to learn the schema DSL than poke around backend language unknown to the developer
- Any change in the contract requires changes in two places (schema and code)
- API consumers can easily suggest changes to the schema that are implemented by the relevant team
- Usually requires some codegen step for each backend and client languages (with the usual codegen problems). Runtime-only schema validation can be done but it is usually a bad idea to rely only on it.
- Easier mocking. Clients can start implementing before backend is ready, tests can be written against mocks.
There are definitely more pros and cons that I am missing, but it is a tradeoff. I would say if you have multiple backend services and supporting multiple backend languages I would definitely go for schema-first.
You can work with OpenAPI in a schema-first way but as many people have pointed out over the years OpenAPI yaml files are, to be polite, not very human-friendly. TypeSpec seems to be a more sensible way to work with HTTP apis in a schema first way while keep interoperability with existing OpenAPI tooling at the cost of extra codegen step (typespec .tps -> openapi .yaml)
Some commands are used so often that it makes sense to further shorten them by placing them in `.bash_aliases` or a similar file for your favorite shell:
