Observability on the Edge With OTel and FluentBit

When we design observability pipelines for modern cloud environments, we implicitly rely on a set of luxurious guarantees: limitless bandwidth, highly available networks, practically infinite storage, and abundant computing power. But when you move these workloads to the edge, think of a maritime vessel navigating the mid-Atlantic or a remote wind turbine, those guarantees vanish. Edge environments are constrained by intermittent connectivity, severe limits on CPU and RAM, and a lack of persistent storage guarantees.