Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AWS re:Invent, the biggest cloud-computing event of the year, ended on Friday and left behind a slew of exciting new features and products for building serverless applications. Let’s summarize what was announced and how those updates can be significant for you.

This week was very exciting at AWS re:Invent. There were many, many new services announced. One new service that was announced is called AWS Transfer for SFTP. AWS Transfer for SFTP allows you to setup a managed SFTP server which will upload and download files to Amazon S3, using the SFTP protocol. This is a great way to transfer files in to and out of Amazon S3 using standard tools.

LogicMonitor’s CloudWatch Events integration enables you to minimize troubleshooting time by displaying contextual events for your monitored resources alongside performance data. Many routine events, such as deployments, resource provisioning and de-provisioning, or configuration changes, have the potential to impact resource performance. Without being able to see the event in the same context as the performance data, it can be challenging to correlate the two.

When Ruby support on AWS Lambda was announced yesterday, I was so excited about it that I had to try it right away. We've been using Lambda for a while at Honeybadger, and I have longed to be able to write our functions in Ruby. Having played with the new Ruby support for a few hours, I'm feeling confident we'll be spending less time with Node, Go, and Python. :)

To build applications in AWS Lambda, you often need to use third party libraries and packages in your function code. Previously, these packages had to be included in a function’s deployment package. Today, Amazon Web Services released a new feature called Layers to simplify this process for Lambda developers. Layers allow you to deploy common components that you can reuse across functions, such as machine learning models, SDKs, or instrumentation libraries.

LogDNA today announced a new offering that enables developers to troubleshoot coding bugs and quickly fix development errors in applications, potentially saving businesses millions of dollars in development hours, downtime and associated revenue loss. IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA integrates LogDNA services to allow developers to aggregate all their log data across applications in the IBM Cloud.

Lambda layers and runtime API are two new feature of AWS Lambda which open up fun possibilities for customizing the Lambda runtime and enable decreased duplication of code across Lambda functions. Layers lets you package up a set of files and include them in multiple functions. Runtime API provides an API for interacting with the Lambda service function lifecycle events which lets you be much more flexible about what you run in your Lambda.

AWS’s announcement of Lambda Layers means big things for those of us using serverless in production. The creation of set components that can be included with any number of Lambdas means you no longer have to zip up your application code and all its dependencies each time you deploy a serverless stack. This allows you to include dependencies that are much more bespoke to your particular serverless environment.

Since Amazon released Lambda in late 2014, the notion of serverless applications and function-as-a-service has steadily gained steam. Being able to focus on application code and simplifying infrastructure management is alluring, but traditional monitoring methods are no longer applicable. With less visibility, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring methods. In this post, we discuss those monitoring methods, CloudWatch Metrics and CloudWatch Logs.