Kelemetry: global tracing for Kubernetes control plane

Byte Dance, a Chinese-based social platform company most famous in the English market for Tik Tok and Nuverse Gaming, built an internal tracing system for the Kubernetes control plane.

Traditional distributed tracing will create spans that follow the course of one user request – but because the elements in the control plane are designed to update themselves based on state changes in other controllers, the user request stops after the first state change and doesn’t track all the others.

Kelemetry is designed to create a span when an object changes in state and then look for the same state in other objects that then become child spans, so a Kelemetry trace can follow the full process of initializing a Kubernetes server.

If you’re interested, you can read more in Jonathan Chan’s post on the CNCF blog.