It seems to me that you should be able to use your Fluentd pipeline in place of the forwarder component, I don't think there's any magic going on there. The engineering here seems to be in the ingest, replication, storage, and query side of things, none of which Fluentd addresses, really.
The problem is that instead of submitting logs using a plugin (written in
Ruby) I need to (a) spawn a separate process using (b) unrelated binary.
I should have the possibility to not jump out to a separate process and
I shouldn't need to ship binary to my log routers (a plugin in Ruby or Python
is just a text, so it's easier to distribute with configuration management).
The same thing stands for querying. Now the only possible (documented) way is
to call the binary.
As I said, this is a problem with lack of protocol specifications, not with
the architecture.
