Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

April 2021

Dashbird becomes Gartner Cool Vendor 2021!

We’re officially cool! Dashbird is extremely proud to be named as a Cool Vendor by Gartner in Monitoring, Observability, and Cloud Operations in their 28 April 2021 report on “Cool Vendors in Monitoring, Observability and Cloud Operations”. “Dashbird provides a novel approach to observability for serverless applications that run inside an AWS environment.

What Are AWS Lambda Triggers?

This is a basic introduction to Lambda triggers that uses DynamoDB as an event source example. We talk a lot about the more advanced level of Lambda triggers in our popular two-part series: Complete Guide to Lambda Triggers. If you want to learn more, read part one and part two. We’re going back to the basics this time because skipping some steps when learning something new might get you confused. It tends to get annoying, or it can even make you frustrated. Why?

Test Azure Service Bus Performance by Generating a Million Test Messages

For the people using Azure Service Bus namespaces – we often have the need to ensure the Azure Service Bus Performance by testing our system integration by generating some test messages on the Azure Service Bus resources. You might need this for QA/Development for performance testing, load testing etc. This blog will explain how to simulate the test environment using Serverless360 to check Azure Service Bus performance and its throughput.

10 Simple AWS Hacks That Will Make You Super Productive

Useful AWS hacks and tricks that will save you time and money. If you work a lot with AWS, you probably realized that literally, everything on AWS is an API call; hence everything can be automated. This article will discuss several tricks that will save you time when performing everyday tasks in the AWS cloud. Make sure to read till the end. The most interesting one is listed at the very end 😉

What is KFServing?

TL;DR: KFServing is a novel cloud-native multi-framework model serving tool for serverless inference. KFServing was born as part of the Kubeflow project, a joint effort between AI/ML industry leaders to standardize machine learning operations on top of Kubernetes. It aims at solving the difficulties of model deployment to production through the “model as data” approach, i.e. providing an API for inference requests.

Webinar: How Medtronic Tripled Serverless Development Velocity

In this webinar, experts from Medtronic and Lumigo review the architecture and monitoring setup of Medtronic's AWS serverless environment, which processes more than a billion Lambda requests a month. They will show real-world examples of how the Medtronic serverless dev team quickly finds areas for improvement and acts on them.

Introducing all new Serverless360 in preview

Towards the end of 2016, it all started with developing a simple platform to manage Microsoft Azure Service Bus namespaces. The then classic Azure portal had limited capabilities to manage Azure Messaging resources like Service Bus Queues and Topics. Paolo Salvatori developed and managed a community tool called Service Bus Explorer. We identified that there are some challenges or limitations in managing and monitoring Azure Messaging resources using the above two.

Serverless 101: What Is It, How Serverless Computing Works, Pros and Cons, and More

Serverless computing is one of the fastest-growing areas in software development, along with hybrid clouds and using multi-cloud strategies. The global serverless architecture market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16.2% in 2021 through 2026. It will reach $10.29 billion from $4.2 billion in 2020, according to MarketWatch. The serverless approach promises to help developers beat the cons of self-managed and even virtual server infrastructure. But is serverless right for you?

Performance Monitoring for AWS Lambda

Let’s start with what you should monitor in Lambda functions. In general, there are two areas – user experience and the cost of the system. User experience usually comes down to availability, latency, and feature set of a service, while the cost of operating a service is important to ensure the profitability of the business.

10x development speed with local serverless debugging

Serverless is great but a lot of it is in the cloud and in all these different services. Oftentimes we hear serverless developers struggle with debugging serverless locally in order to iterate fast. Without an effective debugging setup, they are left frustrated with slowed development cycle time and decreased operational efficiency. In this 45-minute hands-on webinar, we'll be discussing how to debug serverless locally to really speed up your development cycle.

How Much Does AWS Fargate Cost?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides numerous solutions for developers. One of these is Fargate, a serverless container service that allows users to run containers on AWS without the need to manage any underlying infrastructure. Containers are helpful because they solve the problem of getting applications to run reliably when the application is moved from one computing environment to another. AWS Fargate works with both Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

Visualizing your CloudFormation Template with Stackery

Stackery can be used to create a new CloudFormation template or to quickly visualize an existing one. Code is automatically generated as you simply drag-and-drop resources on a graphical grid. The experience is much more intuitive than previous generation tools like AWS CloudFormation Designer. Stackery visualizes resources the way a human would perceive them, grouping related resources together.

The great serverless cost debate (Serverless = Costless)

If you’re worried that switching to serverless infrastructure is too expensive for your business, you’re not alone. Total spending on cloud services will top $284 billion by 2024. The good news is there are many ways to track and lower your serverless operation costs without slowing down your business. Lambda and how can it help your business? Find out more by reading these Lambda frequently asked questions.

Visualizing CloudFormation templates

As your infrastructure grows, getting a handle on all your AWS resources can be overwhelming. While that’s probably an understatement, help could be right around the corner. We’ll cover a few CloudFormation visualizer tools that can help, but let’s level set first. AWS CloudFormation is an established Infrastructure-as-Code solution that allows you to define, provision, organize, manage and update your AWS resources from a text-file template.

Best Practices For Logging In AWS Lambda

Today, we’ll cover some of the ways you might find quite useful in your everyday work. We’ll go through some of the logging best practices in AWS Lambda, and we will explain how and why these ways will simplify your AWS Lambda logging. For more information about similar topics, be sure to visit our blog. Let’s start with the basics (and if you have the basics covered, feel free to skip ahead): How does logging work with AWS Lambda?

Why We Built the CloudZero Platform on Serverless Infrastructure - and Its 2 Main Advantages

The promise of running a business on the cloud is that — in theory, at least — you should be able to scale your infrastructure up and down with your customer utilization. This should lead, again in theory, to less maintenance and more opportunity for innovation.

Analyze and audit your infrastructure as code with stack.new

Defining and managing your AWS resources using an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approach implemented with CloudFormation templates makes a lot of sense. While implementing IaC is a widely accepted best practice, it does come with challenges. Managing your infrastructure from lines of code and text-file templates, in the case of AWS CloudFormation, can quickly become overwhelming. We built stack.new to ease that pain.

Introducing Stackoscope For Serverless Applications

Here at Lumigo, we are focused on helping customers succeed with serverless and make it easier for them to build and run serverless applications in production. We love serverless and operate one of the largest serverless systems out there as we ingest and process billions of events from our customers. One thing many customers have asked us for help with is to identify misconfigured resources or places where they can improve by following best practices.

When to use Docker on AWS Lambda, Lambda Layers, and Lambda Extensions

2020 was a difficult year for all of us, and it was no different for engineering teams. Many software releases were postponed, and the industry slowed its development speed quite a bit. But at least at AWS, some teams released updates out of the door at the end of the year. AWS Lambda received two significant improvements: With these two new features and Lambda Layers, we now have three ways to add code to Lambda that isn’t directly part of our Lambda function.