Create OpenTelemetry Demo Light Branch

[henrikrexed]

Feature Request

The current OpenTelemetry demo requires significant resources to run all services, making it difficult to deploy in environments with limited capacity—such as GitHub Codespaces—without using a large instance.
The purpose of this feature request is to create a new branch In the project, named opentelemetry-demo-light providing a lighter version of the demo.

Describe the solution you'd like:

It would be helpful to provide a lightweight version of the demo that includes only a minimal set of core services, such as:

• frontend
• productcatalogservice
• cartservice
• checkoutservice
• paymentservice

This would make it easier for users to explore OpenTelemetry in constrained environments and lower the barrier to entry for experimentation and learning.

[rogercoll]

+1 on this feature request

The main challenge with using branches is maintainability, especially as the main branch continues to evolve. Instead, I’d prefer using flags or environment variables to manage lightweight deployments.

As suggested in issue #2052, adopting Docker profiles could be a great solution. This approach would allow the demo to support multiple deployment “modes” in a cleaner and more flexible way.

[julianocosta89]

The main challenge with using branches is maintainability

YES!

The profiles is a great idea, but still we would need to make the services more configurable.
Via env vars we must be able to specify if a service calls another or not