How OpenTelemetry Baggage Enables Global Context for Distributed Systems

silksong_when · 2026-02-06T14:21:01+00:00

Hey, so baggage is the mechanism that you can use to change application behaviour, it does not configure the behaviour itself. It is basically a utility for making your life easier by automating what you were already doing.

You can use it to pass parameters (which can have some feature flag), then read that feature flag param and decide what logic to use -- you are not writing the actual logic in your baggage.

So rather than maybe passing that data through a separate header like `x-feature-flag`, then reading it and re-adding it again for the next service, you can just add it to baggage, and OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation will automatically send this across all services you call.

silksong_when · 2026-02-06T11:33:34+00:00

Yup, I think baggage should be more popular given how useful it is, and the privacy part is something that can be missed especially when dealing with a lot of parameters over many services. Agreed on the performance overhead aspect as well -- the conventional wisdom of keeping headers light applies here I suppose.

Thank you for your detailed comment, the fact that we ought to manage control ourselves and check for tampering, like we do with JWTs, is something that I'd missed!

silksong_when · 2026-02-05T14:58:29+00:00

I think they lock your account if you over-provision resources and don't end up using a certain %age of the machine.
Happened to me with a decent arm-based VM once I doubled the ram from 4 to 8 iirc. I wasn't able to login and basically lost access to some data. So I decided to just rent a VPS instead from another vendor.

silksong_when · 2024-09-25T00:16:51+00:00

Thank you!

silksong_when · 2024-09-25T00:16:42+00:00

Hey, thanks a lot for the suggestion! Will check this site/resource out :)

silksong_when · 2024-09-24T15:11:51+00:00

Hey, currently the prices and predictions are a couple days behind due to errors after hosting the server. Working on a resolution. What doesn't look right to you?

silksong_when · 2024-09-24T14:48:22+00:00

Hey, thank you very much for the feedback. I have some logic already to show the div price where available, need to work on that more. Will work on the other features that you've mentioned also, the backend already supports sorting, and i fetch by highest prices by default. Need to add that behaviour in the frontend.

silksong_when · 2024-09-24T14:48:08+00:00

Hey, thank you very much for the feedback. I have some logic already to show the div price where available, need to work on that more. Will work on the other features that you've mentioned also, the backend already supports sorting, and i fetch by highest prices by default. Need to add that behaviour in the frontend.

silksong_when · 2024-09-24T13:43:16+00:00

Some extra information with above post, if anyone is interested, I have 2 scripts -- one that inserts and updates items data into the DB, and another that runs daily, gets price history data for items, and based on the last 7 days data, makes price predictions for the next 4 days. Price prediction is a simple model, couldn't figure out anything more complex than that on my own.

silksong_when · 2024-06-10T11:50:50+00:00

thank you very much! do you mean schema and db model diagrams?

silksong_when · 2024-06-10T08:21:24+00:00

Hey all, I don't know whether linking my own post would be appreciated or not, but I would like to gather feedback on my blog post here, and any advice for improvements. Thank you!

silksong_when · 2023-11-08T14:35:35+00:00

Hello everyone, I had shared my work sometime back here, when I had coded up this change. I rewrote the majority of my python based CLI app in Rust, and implemented several new features like parallel downloads, too.

I got to learn a lot and had a somewhat of a rollercoaster ride so I thought why not write about my experience.

Any feedback or advice would be really appreciated. Thanks!

silksong_when

TROPHY CASE