[cloud provider] host.id semantics are too broad

[mx-psi]

host.id is currently used as a catch-all convention for any sort of ID in cloud providers or machines alike, this makes it difficult to use by vendors to retrieve specific cloud provider IDs.

Currently, a single host will have a single value for host.id; in certain environments you can rely on other cloud. attributes like cloud.platform to understand the specific value within host.id. For example, if cloud.platform is aws_ec2, then implictly this ensures that host.id, if present, will have the AWS EC2 instance id.

Proposals like #576 make it so a single host may have multiple possible values for host.id; this makes it impossible for a vendor to identify the actual meaning of host.id.

Within the OpenTelemetry Github org, these are the current values for host.id other than machine-id:

• Azure VM ID (.NET contrib, Python contrib. Ruby contrib, Collector contrib)
• Azure App Service's WEBSITE_HOSTNAME (Python contrib)
• AWS EC2 instance id (PHP contrib, Collector contrib)
• GKE Host id, GCE Host id (Go contrib, Ruby contrib, Collector contrib)
• Consul node id (Collector)

A solution for this is introducing semantic conventions that are specific to a given cloud provider. For example, we currently have gcp.gce.instance.name and #600 proposes a similar convention for AWS EC2.

[ChrsMark]

cc @open-telemetry/semconv-system-approvers

[AfreasF5]

The challenge with any ID is that an ID is only truly usable in a specific context. Given the existence of a host in multiple contexts. Should we look at host.id as a graph and the variations of the ids as a node in a graph that has a graph id that is shared across the contexts.

[mx-psi]

This is something that the Entities SIG should look into before we make progress