Co-founder/CEO of Pixie here.

Thanks for the feedback. In general we try to keep the footprint of services on customer environments small. Since Pixie is mostly an ephemeral system our storage requirements are relatively modest. What this does allow us to do is process enough of the data on the customer machines locally that we only have to send back and store summaries. The long term goal is to build a cloud + edge based system where we can efficiently process data by having data locality.

Kubernetes gives us a substrate where these types of systems are manageable without too many complications. In the longer run we will likely have VPC hosted services as well for people who just don’t want to deal with it.