Apple acquires highly efficient observability solution, SigLens
Apple has acquired SigScalr, maker of the open-source observability platform, SigLens.
Modern applications are composed of hundreds of interconnected microservices, making it incredibly complex to locate root-cause bugs.
Improving its own systems
Apple acquired SigLens to integrate its lightning-fast debugging and tracing capabilities into its own internal developer toolsets, with tech experts anticipating these capabilities will eventually surface inside Xcode.
That’s because SigLens was an open-source observability platform that manages to be both robust and fast. It’s designed to handle large volumes of logs, metrics, and traces, and uses a bunch of proprietary micro-indexing and dynamic columnar compression to reduce storage requirements and deliver search performance.
As an app, SigLens promised “lightning-fast searches, a user-friendly interface, and robust scalability that can handle massive amounts of data without compromising on performance.”
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A listing on AWS marketplace explained its advantages: “SigLens is [an] observability solution that is 100x more efficient than Splunk/Elastic. It is 54x faster than ClickHouse and 1025x faster than ElasticSearch. With just 2 vCPU you can run 2 TB/day of observability volume.”
What will the developer play be?
There are lots of ways this benefits Apple, internally and for developers. After all, faster log search and lower storage costs matter when you’re running vast internal services and building increasingly complex AI/dev tools.
You can pick up some more insight into the nature of the service at SiliconAngle, which quoted then CEO, Kunal Nawale on the advantages of the tech. SigLens is highly scalable, supporting thousands of concurrent queries on terabytes of data with sub-second response time and can be run on-premises.
“As data volumes grow above 1 terabyte a day, you can get to paying $15,000 a month on egress fees,” Nawale said. “We let you run inside your network, so you don’t incur those costs.”
Now it looks like this will be running in Apple’s network instead, likely to support software quality, AI development, and developer tools.
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