Files

T

jcoffey-dev e57486add5 Position against Cribl as well as Splunk, and say what that costs us

Splunk and Cribl are not the same competitor and the claim is not the
same claim twice. Splunk is the destination and Cairn OBS replaces it,
which is what phases 0-7 were for. Cribl is the road: routing, reduction,
enrichment, redaction and replay on the way to wherever data is going.
Cairn OBS is already a road in shape -- agent, Redpanda, ingest -- and
exposes none of a pipeline's controls. The agent cannot filter, drop,
sample, mask or re-route anything; ingest normalises a schema and writes
it; there is exactly one destination and it is us.

Reconciling the two turns up something a cost-led project has to face
rather than paper over: most people buy Cribl because Splunk is expensive
per gigabyte, so being genuinely cheap per gigabyte removes the main
reason to buy Cribl in front of us. That makes the strongest pitch "one
system where there were two" rather than "we are also a pipeline vendor"
-- but that pitch only survives a buyer if we also do the four things
people buy a pipeline for that are not about spend: routing to several
destinations, redacting before data leaves the network, archive and
replay, and not being locked to one analytics vendor. Those are about
control, which is better ground anyway: cost advantages get matched and
architectural ones do not.

The consequence is uncomfortable and is written down as a decision rather
than left to be discovered: competing with Cribl means being able to send
data to S3, Splunk HEC, Elastic, OTLP and Kafka -- building features whose
purpose is to help data leave this platform. A project that refuses
lock-in in its licence and then builds it into its egress would be lying
about itself.

Four phases follow, ordered so each pays for itself: processing (8),
routing (9), archive and replay (10), fleet (11). Processing without
routing still shrinks what is stored; routing without processing forwards
everything and helps nobody.

One design decision is called out now because it collides with a
non-negotiable constraint. Cribl's rule language is JavaScript, and
embedding a JS engine in a statically-linked musl agent would end "no
glibc runtime deps" as a claim. The recommendation is a declarative rule
DSL -- matchers and typed actions, no arbitrary code -- deliberately less
expressive, small enough to audit and safe to push to ten thousand hosts.

The retention/TTL question in architecture.md is no longer deferrable and
now says so: Phase 10 asks it from the other side.

2026-09-04 16:29:29 -07:00

4.9 KiB

Raw Blame History

Project: Cairn OBS — Distributed Log Aggregation & Observability Platform

Mission

Build an open-core, Kubernetes-native centralized logging platform that rivals Splunk on features but wins on cost-per-GB, modern language stack, and honest multi-tenant RBAC. Full architecture spec is in /docs/architecture.md — read it before touching any component. Do not deviate from the storage/query split described there without flagging it to me first.

Cairn OBS is positioned against Cribl as well, which is a different claim rather than the same one twice: Splunk is the destination and Cairn OBS replaces it; Cribl is the road, and Cairn OBS is currently a road that exposes none of a pipeline's controls. Reconciling the two — including the part where cheap storage removes the usual reason to buy Cribl at all, and the part where competing with it means helping data leave this platform — is /docs/positioning.md, along with the four phases of processing, routing, archive/replay and fleet work it implies. Read it before proposing anything pipeline-shaped.

Non-negotiable constraints

Distro-agnostic Linux agent: must run identically on RHEL/Debian/Arch/SUSE derivatives via a statically-linked musl binary. No glibc runtime deps.
Windows support via native ETW/Event Log API, not a WSL shim.
AGPLv3 for the entire project, no exceptions. The enterprise/ module (SSO/multi-tenancy/compliance) was under a commercial-license stub from Phase 4 through Phase 5; Phase 6 relicensed it to AGPLv3, matching core — see /docs/compliance/license-audit-report.md for the full record and its business-model consequences. enterprise/ stays a separate directory that core never imports from, but that boundary is now architectural only (keeps core buildable/deployable standalone, keeps tenant resolution server-side), not a licensing wall.
Schema-on-write with OTel semantic conventions as the default schema, with schema-on-read fallback for unstructured text.
Every UI action must correspond to a documented REST/gRPC call. No UI-only logic. CLI (cairnobsctl) and Terraform provider are first-class, not afterthoughts. Status: cairnobsctl has been built out phase by phase since Phase 3. The Terraform provider (/terraform) only exists as of this note -- four resources (cairnobs_dashboard and cairnobs_dashboard_panel, both full CRUD, panels as their own resource rather than a nested block since the API manages them independently of their parent dashboard; cairnobs_alert_rule and cairnobs_notification_target, both create/destroy only -- alerting has no PUT /rules/{id} or PUT /targets/{id} to update against), each paired with a read-only data source, built on HashiCorp's terraform-plugin-framework, reusing the exact same REST contracts cairnobsctl dashboards apply/web's dashboard export and cairnobsctl alerts apply already use. Tenant/RBAC resources are real, disclosed future work -- see /terraform/README.md for the full accounting of what is and isn't built, and the same "written but not run against a live stack" verification caveat as everything else Docker-gated in this repo.

Tech stack (pinned — do not substitute without discussion)

Component	Language/Tool
Edge agent	Rust, musl target
Transport	Redpanda (Kafka API)
Ingest/parse	Go
Analytical store	ClickHouse
Full-text index	Tantivy (Rust)
Control plane/API	Go, gRPC + REST gateway
Frontend	SvelteKit + TypeScript
Deployment	Kubernetes Operator (Go, kubebuilder), Helm, docker-compose for local/homelab

Repo conventions

Monorepo, one top-level dir per component (see structure below).
Rust: workspace-based, cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings must pass.
Go: standard go vet + golangci-lint, no globals for shared state.
Every component ships with: unit tests, a README.md, and a Dockerfile using distroless or scratch base images where feasible.
Conventional commits. Every PR-sized change should be a logically complete, independently revertible unit.
Prefer boring, well-understood dependencies over novel ones. This is infrastructure software; operators need to trust it.

Project status

Phase-by-phase scope, what "done" meant for each, and the verification record — including what is not yet shipped and what remains unverified — live in /docs/status.md. Read it before assuming a capability works end-to-end; several are built but unconfirmed against a live stack, and the per-phase runbooks in /docs record exactly how each was checked.

When in doubt

Ask before: changing the pinned stack, adding a new external dependency that pulls in a large transitive tree, or making an architectural decision that isn't already specified in /docs/architecture.md.

4.9 KiB Raw Blame History