Removed: 570 packages from the Linux trace-agent binary, including 526 k8s.io packages one function pulled in without using them, and 245 MiB from the main Linux amd64 artifacts by excluding the standard-library plugin package.
Outcome: Go binaries down by up to 77% between 7.60.0 (December 2024) and 7.68.0 (July 2025); across Linux amd64, Core Agent 236 MiB → 103 MiB and Security Agent 152 MiB → 35 MiB. No product features were removed.
The Datadog Agent’s Linux artifacts grew from 428 MiB in 7.16.0 to 1.22 GiB in 7.60.0. Between 7.60.0 (December 2024) and 7.68.0 (July 2025) the team cut the Go binaries by up to 77%, and they published the unused imports that had been paying the bill. One function in trace-agent pulled in Kubernetes packages the binary did not use: 526 packages from k8s.io, at least 30 MB. Moving that function into its own package let the compiler drop them — “570 packages removed from the Linux trace-agent binary and a size reduction of about 36 MiB—more than half of the binary”. Importing the standard-library plugin package, via containerd, had forced the linker to keep every method; a build tag so they could exclude it cut 245 MiB from the main Linux amd64 artifacts. They are explicit that no product features were removed: the code they stopped shipping was still in the binary because of how it was imported, not because anyone needed it.
Source: Datadog, How we reduced the size of our Agent Go binaries by up to 77% (18 February 2026)