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Datadog Agent Binary Size Reduction

2 posts · Apr 2025 – Feb 2026

What this trail covers

Datadog's Go Agent binaries have undergone significant size reductions, decreasing by up to 77% through systematic dependency auditing, targeted refactors, and re-enabling linker optimizations. This effort involved analyzing build tag usage, isolating dependencies into separate packages, and leveraging tools like `go list` and `goda` for dependency graphing. The project also led to contributions to the Go toolchain and improvements for other large Go projects like Kubernetes.

All Datadog trails
  1. How we reduced the size of our Agent Go binaries by up to 77% | DatadogThis post details how Datadog reduced the size of its Agent Go binaries by up to 77% through dependency auditing, refactoring, and re-enabling linker optimizations. It explains Go's build process, introduces tools like `go list` and `goda` for analyzing dependencies, and discusses strategies for excluding unwanted dependencies using build tags and package isolation. The team also contributed improvements to the Go toolchain.
  2. Squeezing every millisecond: How we rebuilt the Datadog Lambda Extension in Rust | DatadogThe Datadog Lambda Extension was re-engineered from Go to Rust, achieving significant performance improvements: 82% reduction in cold start latency, 40% reduction in memory usage, and a binary size decrease from 55 MB to 7 MB. This involved adopting Rust for its memory safety and small binary output, and implementing specific design constraints for the Lambda environment, such as minimizing impact on the Lambda function handler and post-runtime duration. Manual implementation of AWS API calls was used to avoid SDK overhead. Flexible flush strategies (end, race, periodic) were introduced to optimize telemetry delivery based on workload type.