Thanks for the reply!

I think I must be missing something, but it seems like the big difference between Tempo and a traditional tracing system is the storage indexing & database (ES/C* vs object store and index all fields vs key/value lookup by ID). I vaguely remember reading something that latency even from EC2 -> S3 can be around 200-300ms. Wouldn't this cause the overhead to rise?

Feel free to point me to any documentation that clear this up!