System Design Deep Dive: Distributed Observability Architecture

This section provides an exhaustive, interview-grade system design analysis for 14-Tracing-Backend, modeling the requirements, capacity, bottlenecks, and evolutionary scaling up to 100,000 spans per second.

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System Design Chapters

1. 14.1 Requirements & Capacity Estimation
2. 14.2 Architecture Styles & Ingestion Decomposition
3. 14.3 Networking, Protocols & OTLP Transport
4. 14.4 Load Balancing, Partitioning & Autoscaling
5. 14.5 Databases & Columnar Storage Engine
6. 14.6 Caching & Span Ring Buffers
7. 14.7 Messaging, Ingestion Queues & Stream Leveling
8. 14.8 Consistency, Concurrency & Clock Skew
9. 14.9 Reliability, Circuit Breakers & Backpressure
10. 14.10 API Gateway & Ingestion Rate Limiting
11. 14.11 Security, Multi-Tenancy & PII Redaction
12. 14.12 Search, Vector Embeddings & AI Architecture
13. 14.13 Real-Time Streaming & WebSocket Updates
14. 14.14 Observability, OpenTelemetry & Self-Monitoring
15. 14.15 Performance Engineering & Memory Overhead
16. 14.16 Cost Modeling & Capacity Projections
17. 14.17 Classic System Design Problems Applied to Tracing
18. Architecture Decisions Record (ADR Log)