See some more details around the motivations and history here: https://gouthamve.dev/tempo-a-game-of-trade-offs/

It will be easier and cheaper to manage compared to Jaeger but doesn't yet have any ability to search inbuilt (which is one of the reasons Jaeger is expensive).

That’s our motivation and experience over the last 6 months running it internally at Grafana Labs. Much cheaper and easier to operate.

Not to bash Jaeger though, its more powerful than tempo in that it allows you to search for traces. Tempo is about integrating with Grafana, Loki and Prometheus for finding traces.

Jaeger has a local storage option (badger) that is OK for "ephemeral" tracing. I use it for development environments and in production (where each app can have it's own Jaeger instance). The data gets wiped periodically, prometheus metrics are used for trending.

> Backing Jaeger with Elasticsearch or Cassandra was a nightmare.

Unless you're already running one of these, in which case deploying Jaeger is very easy (at least, that was my experience with our Elasticsearch backend).

> much more performant.

You expect an object store to be more performant than Elasticsearch?