AWS Step Functions is a powerful orchestration service that lets you model even the most complex business workflows. It packs a great visualization tool (which you can also use to design your workflows visually now!) and can integrate with many AWS services directly, including Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway. It’s one of my favorite AWS services and I often use it to model complex or business-critical workflows.
Serverless applications, more often than not, have logic distributed over multiple functions and services, which with growth and agents and wrappers attached, can get more complex and costly. This is where Serverless monitoring comes in to help. But what is Serverless monitoring? Serverless monitoring allows developers to gain important insight on what happens during each execution and event, errors become more easily visible, and measuring resource consumption for each invocation is possible.
Another generic error message from our favorite FaaS provider AWS Lambda. And again, there are multiple reasons why this issue could arise. Let’s first look at the basics of AWS Lambda to get a better intuition for when things go wrong later. Lambda is an asynchronous event-based service at heart.
We’ve been monitoring 100,000’s of serverless backend components for 3+ years at Dashbird. In our experience, Serverless infrastructure failures boil down to: These isolated faults become causes of failure due to dependencies in our cloud architectures (ref. Difference of Fault vs. Failure). If a serverless Lambda function relies on a database that is under stress, the entire API may start returning 5XX errors.
Vercel is a deployment and collaboration platform that enables frontend developers to build high-performance Jamstack websites and applications. Vercel is also the creator of Next.js, a React framework developed in collaboration with engineers at Google and Facebook in 2016. Vercel users can leverage a built-in deployment tool that manages the build and rendering process, as well as a proprietary Edge Network that caches their sites for fast retrieval.
Chances are if you’re a developer or part of a DevOps team you’ve had a polarizing conversation or two about containers versus serverless. In this post we recap a debate hosted by NetApp on this topic. Arguing for containers is Kevin McGrath, Chief Technology Officer, Spot by NetApp. On the side of serverless is Forrest Brazeal, Director of Content and Community at A Cloud Guru. In this post we will cover the key arguments on both sides. YouTube An error occurred.
We asked seven serverless experts, knowing what they know now, what piece of advice would they give to their past selves on moving to serverless. Here’s what they had to say: Ben Ellerby, AWS Serverless Hero and VP of Engineering at Theodo Serverless is a mindset change, bring your teams with you on the journey. Show them the power of Serverless hands-on – and invest in the developer experience of your pipelines from day 1. Ben Smith, Senior developer advocate for serverless at AWS.
Ensure data quality in your S3 data lake using Python, AWS Lambda, SNS, and Great Expectations. Data lakes used to have a bad reputation when it comes to data quality. In contrast to data warehouses, data doesn’t need to adhere to any predefined schema before we can load it in. Without proper testing and governance, your data lake can easily turn into a data swamp.
When building serverless applications, Lambda functions often form the backbone of the system. They might provide just a few lines of code, but these lines are usually what hold the whole architecture composed of many managed services together. Event-driven architecture is what this style is called, and it’s most prevalent in serverless applications. API gateways collect requests from your users, convert them to events, and send these along the way.
In this post, we will discuss some key considerations and strategies to collect and analyze your AWS Lambda logs. This will include 1) what to know about logging Lambda functions, 2) how to ship log data to a centralized logging solution, and 3) how to search and visualize log data on monitoring dashboards.
