When one thinks about OpenTelemetry, the first thoughts that come to mind are traces, metrics, logs, or even profiles. Baggage, as a signal, doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves, but those that have built solutions to propagate domain-specific information from service A to service G via custom headers have learnt that it’s a lot harder than it may initially seem!

In this talk, we’ll demystify OTel Baggage as a W3C-standardised, vendor-neutral specification for in-band context propagation. The official "carry-on" for your request context, designed to travel with it everywhere (yes, that pun was very much intended).

We'll explore the challenges it solves, some common use cases, and we'll deep-dive into how Skyscanner uses OTel Baggage to propagate Quality of Service (QoS) information. You'll see how this baggage, carrying user priority, is passed down the stack and used by Istio to make intelligent load-shedding decisions.

Come claim the context you've been missing!