The data is received via OTLP (Otel protocol) and almost immediately inserted into ClickHouse buffer table in small batches. Simple and very efficient.
Tail-based sampling will require buffering spans in memory for some time, but tail-based sampling is not implemented yet.
Cloud version also uses Kafka to survive surges in traffic, but I guess "personal" / company version does not need that as much. So no need to introduce additional dependency.