1. Yes, you can. We initially targeted Kubernetes because that's what we use and packaging for it is simple. We'll soon release packages for all distros, support syslog/journald etc.

2. Hmm, please open an issue regarding this with the use-case that prompted this? This is not a use-case we have but if this is important for more people, we'd be happy to support it!

3. You can only select based on the metadata, the metadata is just a set of kv pairs. Like {app=cassandra, namespace=prod, instance=cassandra-minion-0}

4. Yes, we used gzip. Please see the sheet referenced at the end of the design doc [0] to see what we compared with.

5. It's mainly protobufs right now [1] over HTTP, but we'll be adding more docs soon. Mind opening an issue for this so that we don't forget?

[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/11tjK_lvp1-SVsFZjgOTr1vV3... [1] https://github.com/grafana/loki/tree/master/pkg/logproto