Technical requirements

At the time of writing, OpenTelemetry for Python supports Python 3.6+. All Python examples in this book will use Python 3.8, which can be downloaded and installed by following the instructions at https://docs.python.org/3/using/index.html. The following command can verify which version of Python is installed. It's possible for multiple versions to be installed simultaneously on a single system, which is why both python and python3 are shown here:

$ python --version
$ python3 --version

It is recommended to use a virtual environment to run the examples in this book (https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html). A virtual environment in Python allows you to install packages in isolation from the rest of the system, meaning that if anything goes wrong, you can always delete the virtual environment and start a fresh one. The following commands will create a new virtual environment in a folder called cloud_native_observability:

$ mkdir cloud_native_observability...