preface

The idea of writing about Fluent Bit first came up around 2021. At the time, I was writing a book on Fluentd for Manning (Logging in Action), and I’d talked with Eduardo Silva Pereira, the creator of Fluent Bit, and Anurag Gupta, the leader of Fluentd. Extending Logging in Action wasn’t a practical option, and I wasn’t sure I could make the case for a dedicated book. I could see the trend toward OpenTelemetry and its influence on technology direction, but the standards weren’t yet stable, and I assumed that Fluentd would lead the charge in engaging with the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) standard. But Eduardo and Anurag had already picked up on the trends accelerating the adoption of Fluent Bit. They saw the continued adoption of native binaries in the Kubernetes space getting more compact and providing faster performance. (After all, at scale, saving even 5% of your compute effort yields dividends.)