Add blog on zipkin deprecation

content/en/blog/2025/deprecating-zipkin-exporters.md

@@ -0,0 +1,53 @@
+---
+title: Deprecating Zipkin Exporter
+linkTitle: Deprecating Zipkin Exporter
+date: 2025-12-01
+author: >-
+  [Liudmila Molkova](https://github.com/lmolkova) (Grafana Labs)
+sig: Specification
+issue: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/pull/4715
+cSpell:ignore: Liudmila Molkova
+---
+
+The OpenTelemetry project is deprecating the Zipkin exporter specification in
+favor of
+[Zipkin's OTLP ingestion support](https://github.com/openzipkin-contrib/zipkin-otel).
+
+Thank you to all Zipkin contributors for helping OpenTelemetry reach this
+milestone!
+
+After analyzing usage patterns across language ecosystems, we've observed that
+the community has strongly gravitated toward OTLP, with Zipkin exporters seeing
+limited adoption — in several languages, even less than the already-deprecated
+Jaeger exporter. Combined with minimal user engagement on related issues and the
+availability of alternatives, we believe this is the right time to sunset Zipkin
+exporters in OTel SDKs.
+
+## Timeline and migration path
+
+- **Specification deprecation**: Effective from December 2025.
+- **SDK support**: Existing stable Zipkin exporters will continue to receive
+  security patches and critical bug fixes until at least **December 2026**,
+  following the
+  [SDK stability guarantees](/docs/specs/otel/versioning-and-stability/#sdk-support).
+- **New SDKs**: Implementing a Zipkin exporter is not required for new language
+  SDKs.
+
+## What should users do?
+
+If you're currently using a Zipkin exporter, you have two migration paths:
+
+- **Switch to OTLP** (recommended): Configure your application to send traces
+  using OTLP and enable
+  [Zipkin's OTLP ingestion support](https://github.com/openzipkin-contrib/zipkin-otel).
+- **Use the Collector**: Route your OTLP data through the OpenTelemetry
+  Collector with its
+  [Zipkin exporter](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/tree/main/exporter/zipkinexporter).
+
+## Questions?
+
+Reach out in the
+[#otel-specification](https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/C01N7PP1THC)
+channel on CNCF Slack or create an issue in the
+[opentelemetry-specification](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification)
+repository.

static/refcache.json

@@ -13263,6 +13263,10 @@
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