Since Amazon released Lambda in late 2014, the notion of serverless applications and function-as-a-service has steadily gained steam. Being able to focus on application code and simplifying infrastructure management is alluring, but traditional monitoring methods are no longer applicable. With less visibility, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring methods. In this post, we discuss those monitoring methods, CloudWatch Metrics and CloudWatch Logs.

Founded by twin sisters in San Francisco well before the city became the focal point of tech, Benefit has been a refreshing and innovative answer to cosmetics customers for over 40 years. The company is a major player in this competitive industry, with a presence at over 2,000 counters in more than 30 countries and online. In recent years, Benefit has undergone a swift digital transformation, with a popular eCommerce site in addition to their brick-and-mortar stores.

The whole internet is abuzz over GitHub Actions, if by ‘whole internet’ you mean ‘the part of the internet that is obsessed with serverless ops’ and by ‘abuzz’ you mean ‘aware of‘. But Actions are a bit surprising! GitHub is a company that has famously focused on doing a single thing extremely well. As the ranks of developer-tooling SaaS companies swells by the day, you would think GitHub would have long ago joined the fray.

To make serverless architectures more observable, we’re excited to introduce the new Cloud Functions view in Datadog. You can now search, filter, and explore all your AWS Lambda functions in one central view, and dive straight into detailed performance data that is scoped to a single function. The Cloud Functions view brings together Lambda metrics and logs with distributed request traces from your functions, which are now available in Datadog thanks to our new integration with AWS X-Ray.

We have a running joke at Stackery regarding our tiny little gong that’s used to mark the occasion when we get a new customer. And while I’m all about the sales team celebrating their successes (albeit with a far-too-small gong), I felt like the dev team needed its own way to commemorate major product releases and iterations.

Welcome savvy builder. If you’ve made it to our corner of the Internet and headed to re:invent, you are in the right place. We want you to leave Las Vegas with the savvy to choose how and when to apply the growing menu of serverless capabilities to your initiatives. To help you, we’re sending our serverless-first engineers to Las Vegas with three goals.

We have read with great interest the recently released The New Stack ebook entitled: Guide to Serverless Technologies. It is a great report with great insights! We encourage you to read it as well (it's free!). We have recently closed our own survey and are tabulating the results and have seen many similarities and some differences in the responses. Weighing in on the findings of the New Stack survey in advance of releasing our report, we wanted to comment on three key themes from this eBook…

Traditionally in white-box monitoring, error reporting has been achieved with third party libraries, that catch and communicate failures to external services and notify developers whenever a problem occurrs. I’m here to argue that for managed services this can be achieved with less effort, no agents and without performance overhead.

Dashbird is now available at AWS Marketplace. This means that now users can subscribe directly through AWS Marketplace and manage the subscription through AWS. You can see the listing and subscribe here.

The year is 2020 and you are responsible for ensuring the efficient and reliable operations of millions of dollars of cloud computing infrastructure. Things have changed a lot in the past few years, even more so from the days when you first moved from on-premise and into AWS.