Envoy: tracing: Transition to OpenTelemetry from OpenTracing and OpenCensus

[moderation]

Title: Plan to transition to OpenTelemetry

Description: Envoy currently supports OpenTracing (OTr) and OpenCensus (OC) [0]. In May 2019 it was announced that these projects were merging into the new OpenTelemetry (OTel) project [1]. The original plan was to have the legacy project repos moved to read-only by the end of 2019. That hasn't happened but according to the OTel maintainers they are aiming for beta releases in March [2].

Should Envoy:

• keep OTr and OC and add OTel (eventually deprecating the legacy projects)?
• replace OTr and OC with OTel?

https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/9955 is planning on adding to the OC capability. The OC service / agent repo says its in maintenance mode and points to OTel/opentelemetry-collector

Relevant Links:
0 : config.trace.v3.Tracing.Http
1 : OpenTracing, OpenCensus Merge into a Single New Project, OpenTelemetry
2 : OpenTelemetry Monthly Update: January 2020

[yvespp]

Probably also depends on the C++ otel library so it can be used in envoy.
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-cpp is still in active development and has no releases yet.

[moderation]

AWS adds observability metrics to the OpenTelemetry C++ library

[moderation]

Getting closer - RC1 - https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/10/opentelemetrys-first-release-candidates.html

[moderation]

Announced at re:invent December 2020 - AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry - https://aws-otel.github.io/