It’s time to talk about the everyday challenges of serverless. Whenever I scroll through the latest blog posts on serverless it feels like there are only two types of problems in the field: how do I get started and how do I architect my solution. But what about all the day-to-day problems that developers and DevOps encounter when dealing with serverless? From simple deployment issues like protecting your stack from deletion to stress-testing your solution using serverless techniques.

One of the biggest challenges when adopting serverless today is mastering the developer workflow. “How do I develop locally?”, “How should I test?”, “Should I mock AWS services?”. These are common serverless questions, and the answers out there have been unsatisfying. Until now.

Twistlock is a platform for managing security and compliance within various environments, including virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions. Ensuring legal and technical security is just as valuable as preventing outages and errors, which is why Datadog is delighted to announce a new integration with Twistlock. With this integration, you can track security and compliance risks within the same platform as the metrics, traces, and logs you already collect with Datadog.

It’s hard to believe, but 10 years ago AWS had only five products. Chief among them, of course, was EC2. Although it feels a little quaint now, back then EC2 was an incredible offering. Anyone could fire up a server in seconds, install some code, and transform that generic server into any service one could imagine.

LaunchDarkly has built an impressive feature flag management system that overages more than 200 billion feature flags per day. It has helped companies implement continuous deployment, A/B testing, infrastructure migrations and much more. It also enables canary launches (or dark launches) through its built-in support for percentage-based rollouts.

At Stackery, our engineers live and breathe serverless development every day. Because of this, we are constantly evaluating the current soundbites about it; when a field is expanding this quickly, it’s not uncommon to hear a generous handful of misguided assumptions. So, despite the increasing influence of cloudside development, there are still a number of declarations published every week that seem to amplify some common and outdated misconceptions.

“Value ++” One of our engineers on the TechOps team coined that term. It references the shorthand operator for “increment” in various coding languages. It also is a motto for what we should be doing as a team… always adding value.

AWS introduced Lambda Layers at re:invent 2018 as a way to share code and data between functions within and across different accounts. It’s a useful tool and something many AWS customers have been asking for. However, since we already have numerous ways of sharing code, including package managers such as NPM, when should we use Layers instead? In this post, we will look at how Lambda Layers works, the problem it solves and the new challenges it introduces.

Stackery is a tool to deploy complete serverless applications via Amazon Web Services (AWS). Epsagon monitors and tracks your serverless components to increase observability. Here’s how they can not only work together but improve each other. Let’s start with a scenario: it’s late in the day on Thursday, traffic to your site is way up, and you have reports of problems.

Cognito is AWS’s cloud solution for authentication – if you’re building an app that handles users with passwords, you can use AWS to handle the tricky high-risk security issues related to storing login credentials. No need to go it alone! Pricing is based on your number of monthly active users, and the first 50k users are free. For apps I’ve worked on, we would have been very pleased to grow out of that free tier.