As serverless application architectures have gained popularity, AWS Lambda has become the best-known service for running code on demand without having to manage the underlying compute instances. From an ops perspective, running code in Lambda is fundamentally different than running a traditional application. Most significantly from an observability standpoint, you cannot inspect system-level metrics from your application servers.
Have you ever have that dream where you’re in a class on Classical Tibetan Algebra? And you haven’t done any homework all semester? AND it’s the final? That was me in this session: I was WAY in over my head with this one. Tod Golding’s material was so high-level that I got a nose bleed. Seriously. My nose started gushing 10 minutes in. This Portland dewdrop is NOT used to the dry desert and casino AC air.
As our application scales and many services are accessing a multitude of data points for each workload needed, it is difficult to ensure each part of the system has the right set of data access permissions. In today’s world, one of the worse nightmares of a software business is data leaking and data privacy issues. Not only it affects the brand reputation, but could also expose the company to heavy fines and other regulatory sanctions.
Cold Starts have been a massive issue with FaaS. In summary, it makes functions slower to startup in some cases. That’s in the opposite way of every effort to improve web applications performance. Many efforts have been made in the recent years to solve AWS Lambda cold starts or educate on handling them. Many have mitigated the issue, but none really solved it. AWS has just made a great progress on the area with the Provisioned Capacity feature announcement.
Once upon a time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, servers had to be built. A development team requested an environment for their code to run in, and a system administrator or infrastructure engineer plugged in a server and spent hours or days getting it ready to run code. Oh, and by the way, that was only one server of many required to run a web application—and this only happened after budgets were decided and forms were filled out.
Another day of re:Invent is over and it’s all been amazing and overwhelming. And yes, the medals really do spin. It was a huge honor to be named an AWS Serverless Hero a few weeks ago. As I prepare for more conference talks in the upcoming months, I’m reflecting on what it means to be granted this honor despite having only written my first lines of code earlier this year.
Serverless computing continues to be a growing trend, with AWS Lambda as a main driver of adoption. Today, AWS released Provisioned Concurrency, a new feature that makes AWS Lambda more resilient to cold starts during bursts of network traffic. If you’re running a consumer-facing application, slow page loads and request timeouts can degrade the user experience and lead to significant revenue loss.
AWS today announced Provisioned Concurrency, an exciting feature to allow Lambda customers to not have to worry about cold starts anymore. And we at Lumigo are proud to be an official launch partner for AWS Provisioned Concurrency. In this post we’ll drill into the problems cold starts pose, explore how Provisioned Concurrency resolves them, and explain some rough edges you need to understand when it comes to working with this new feature.
The “serverless” movement is taking the industry by storm and now, with Datadog, you can start monitoring your serverless applications and functions on AWS Lambda. As soon as you enable the Lambda integration, you’ll start to see your metrics in an out-of-the-box dashboard like the one above. Monitor and alert on AWS Lambda serverless functions in minutes with Datadog.
