If you’ve heard of the term “serverless architecture” but you have no idea what it means, don’t feel bad. This buzzword (buzz-phrase?) has been on the rise for the past few years, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop. More and more cloud companies are trying to promote serverless architectures for businesses. There are plenty of benefits to using a serverless architecture for your business.
Want to know what actually goes on under the platform and behind the screens at Dashbird? We recently sat down for a Q&A with our CTO, Marek Tihkan, on leading and managing an engineering team. Today, we speak to Alex, one of the engineers on the Development team and the brain and elbow grease behind our newly launched Dashbird Atlas real-time 3D map of your entire serverless environment.
We’ve noticed interesting threads floating around the internet asking how would you explain serverless to a toddler. As it happens, we just turned three years old and to mark the occasion, we decided to take up the challenge and wrote a bedtime story, for serverless enthusiasts of all ages, about how serverless came to be, from the very beginning. It is a magical tale of the ingenious, life-changing journey that got us to a new universe called Serverless.
Another year of empowering DevOps teams has passed and what a year it’s been! I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the journey, the milestones and challenges this past year encompassed. The last year has been our most transformational to date. We’ve had a huge amount of ups and downs and I’m incredibly proud to say that we got through it and our organization is more resilient, more aligned in our vision and closer as a result.
We’re pleased and honored to be part of the Serverless revolution - continuously innovating to make processes and day-to-day tasks for serverless users more efficient, seamless and enjoyable. So let’s get right into the new and exciting stuff now! Earlier this year, Dashbird launched the very well-received Insights Engine designed to encourage a proactive approach when building and operating serverless applications.
As we enter into our 4th year, we've decided to get up close and personal with our team to share with you their passion, drivers, lessons learned and significant moments of the past year. We're a young company dedicated to adding value in all corners that we reach, so we hope you find the upcoming series useful! Hey Marek, so can you tell us how long you’ve been at Dashbird and where you were before? M: I’ve been at Dashbird for two years now.
Step Functions is a managed service by AWS that implements the Finite-state Machine (FSM) model. You coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows so you can build and update apps quickly. Using Step Functions, you can design and run workflows that stitch together services such as AWS Lambda and Amazon ECS into feature-rich applications. You can read Wikipedia’s definition of a Finite-state Machine, but I think you’ll like the next section more. Keep on reading.
AWS Step Functions is a great service for orchestrating multi-step workflows with complex logic. It’s fast to implement, relatively easy to use and just works. The problem is its price. For relatively low-scale projects, it’s a feasible solution. But for large-scale, enterprise-grade orchestration with hundreds of millions of processes, each with dozens of steps, it can be cost prohibitive.
August 2020 marks 3 years of Dashbird and empowering serverless DevOps teams to fully understand their complex serverless infrastructures by enabling them to get full observability and insights into its performance. This birthday month, we have plenty of surprises, giveaways, and goodies in our sleeve over the next few weeks, so sign up for our newsletter to be the first one to know.
To me personally, when I think programming languages I think JavaScript and while 67% of the developers out there might think the same (at first) that does not imply it’s the most efficient language to use with AWS Lambda. So without further ado, here we go.
