FAAS SIG

August 19, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

Description

The initial goal of this project is to put Lambda monitoring into a consistently good state. Across vendors, customers consistently struggle to instrument their Lambdas and identify the best practices way to monitor a Lambda. Lambda layer behavior differs by language, context propagation is frequently broken, and cold starts are a known issue.

This SIG will also look beyond Lambdas and to more broadly Functions as a Service.

We want to ensure:

  • The FAAS spec has been reviewed, assessed to apply generically, and stabilized
  • Consistent lambda layer behavior by language and uniform conformance to the spec
  • There is clear community guidance on how to monitor Lambdas
  • End to end context propagation using community protocols / propagation across typical Lambda architectures (e.g async)
  • Cold start data capture and submission
  • The new TelemetryAPI is properly integrated and utilized by OpenTelemetry

This SIG will also serve as an interest group for all FAAS topics going forward.

Deliverables

  • Stabilized FAAS semantic conventions
  • Updated Lambda Layer extensions that follow consistent trace propagation and have consistent behavior across languages.
  • Cold start processor for the collector
  • The first 2 language implementations will be Node.JS and Python.

Staffing / Help Wanted

The following vendors are interested in improving this area.:

  • Lightstep
  • AWS
  • Splunk (@tsloughter)
  • Cisco (@arbiv)
  • Honeycomb (@cartermp)

While Lambdas are the focus of this effort we need other Functions As A Service (FAAS) experts to ensure we're building conventions that make sense for the stateless function space in general. GCP or Azure participation would be welcome.

Required staffing

Project Lead: @Aneurysm9

Sponsoring TC Members:

  • @carlosalberto
  • TBA

Implementation Engineers:

  • @tylerbenson
  • @codeboten
  • Cisco contributors (@arbiv)
  • Honeycomb contributors (@cartermp)
  • @tsloughter
  • @xoscar

Implementation Maintainers or Approvers:

  • JavaScript - @mwear
  • Python - @ocelotl

Lambda SME(s): @Aneurysm9 to add

Meeting Times

To deliver the improvements promptly we propose meeting at least 2 days a week for the 6 week planning cycle as specified in the new Semantic Conventions Process Doc

Meeting Times:

PST Option: Tuesday @ 12 pm PST CET Option: Wednesday @ 7 am PST

Timeline

  1. New SIG will be kicked off in January
  2. The SIG has 6 weeks to propose improvements to the specification and solutions - Beginning of March
  3. OTeps and the first implementation in JavaScript will be reviewed by the community - All of March
  4. Implementation - we want to start with JavaScript and Python as our first target implementation languages - Beginning of April

Repo

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-lambda