Avoiding Breaking Changes in Your Project: Lessons From the OpenTele... Pablo Baeyens & Evan Bradley

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Avoiding Breaking Changes in Your Project: Lessons From the OpenTelemetry Collector - Pablo Baeyens, Datadog & Evan Bradley, Dynatrace

The OpenTelemetry Collector and its libraries are used by a variety of audiences including end users of Collector distributions, component developers and other CNCF projects such as Prometheus or Jaeger. Ensuring a reliable and stable behavior and API is fundamental to creating an ecosystem around the project, and it is especially challenging in an open source project.

In this talk we will explore what tools and strategies are used by the Collector SIG to avoid user breakage, estimate the impact of changes and ensure users are notified when changes are unavoidable. Attendees will learn how to design library APIs in a way that minimizes the chance of breakage, how to find out what your users are doing with your project and how to effectively use feature gates when breaking changes are unavoidable. The talk will also detail the challenges found along the way, such as when supporting both stable and unstable protocols, and what other strategies we want to try out in the future.