Among all the new features and services that AWS announced during the re:Invent 2020, my favorites were definitely the AWS Lambda updates. And there were many! For example, your code execution is no longer rounded up to the nearest 100ms of duration for billing — you are now billed on a per millisecond. On top of that, AWS increased the Lambda’s memory capacity to 10 GB, and correspondingly the CPU capacity up to 6 vCPUs.

We all know that debugging serverless is time-consuming and hard and that AWS Console doesn’t make it much easier. CloudWatch isn’t quite known for its ease of use. Why? Well to start with, it has suboptimal search features, logs scattered across multiple buckets and groups, little visualization capability, and no structure of Lambda function invocations.

Mike Rahmati is the Head of the Advisory Board at Dashbird. He is the Co-Founder and CTO of Cloud Conformity (acquired by Trend Micro) – a Cloud Security Posture Management Solution – one of the largest and earliest adopters of serverless. Mike is also an active AWS Community Hero. In this article, he shares his journey and experience with serverless. Cloud Conformity was founded in 2014 as a result of our own experience of issues migrating to the cloud.

It’s safe to say that 2020 has been quite the year for everyone, and at Dashbird we’ve had quite a few changes of our own. It became the year full of improvements, growth, and feature releases that we had only imagined a year ago. This is our round-up of all the feature releases we launched this year. Just starting out with Dashbird? Great, you are in the right place.

Say you are an awesome developer sitting contentedly at your desk when a Slack message suddenly interrupts your peaceful mental flow: It would appear there is a data issue with the new Activity History service released last month… Or at least a couple people think there is. Now, instead of making progress on new tasks, you now need to drop those and look into what’s happening here. Sigh.

Today, we launched a new and improved version of Dashbird’s main screen – a single pane of glass, designed to give you an overview of the most important events and metrics across your serverless environment. During the past year, we have invested heavily into building the next stages of our platform, expanding our offering to include services like API Gateway, SQS, DynamoDB, Step-Functions, ECS, and Kinesis, with many more coming in the next months.

And just like that – welcome to the last part in our “Well-Architected and Serverless” series. We hope it’s been informative, insightful, and fun for you, to explore the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework (WAF) with us! Read the previous posts: Part 1: Security Pillar Part 2: Operational Excellence Pillar Part 3: Reliability Pillar Part 4: Cost Optimization Pillar So let’s look into the last – Performance Efficiency (PERF) – pillar.

We’ve talked about how serverless architecture is a great option for companies that are looking to optimize costs. Just like with all app building and developments, monitoring the performance of your implementation is crucial and we, the folks at Dashbird, understand this need all too well – this is why we’ve spent the better part of the past year and a half to create a monitoring and observability solution for AWS Lambda and other Serverless services.

Monitoring and analytics have been an issue for Serverless systems since they were invented. While it’s easy to attach an agent like NewRelic or DataDog to a server or container, function monitoring requires a different approach. Serverless applications, where logic is distributed over a large number of functions, attaching agents or wrappers leads to cost increase and development overhead.

This is part four of the “Well-Architected Serverless” series. In this post, we’ll talk about the Cost Optimization (COST) pillar of the Well-Architected Framework (WAF). Part 1: Security Part 2: Operational Excellence Part 3: Reliability The COST pillar concerns itself with the money you spend on your cloud infrastructure. It’s important to think about your system’s cost because, in reality, the perfect system won’t be used simply because it’s too expensive.