Universal context propagation for distributed system instrumentation
Jonathan Mace, Rodrigo Fonseca · 2018
Many tools for analyzing distributed systems propagate contexts along the execution paths of requests, tasks, and jobs, in order to correlate events across process, component and machine boundaries. There is a wide range of existing and proposed uses for these tools, which we call cross-cutting tools, such as tracing, debugging, taint propagation, provenance, auditing, and resource management, but few of them get deployed pervasively in large systems. When they do, they are brittle, hard to evolve, and cannot coexist with each other. While they use very different context metadata, the way they propagate the information alongside execution is the same. Nevertheless, in existing tools, these aspects are deeply intertwined, causing most of these problems.