Episode 24: Serverless Observability via the bill is terrible

What is serverless? What do people want it to be? Serverless is when you write your software, deploy it to a Cloud vendor that will scale and run it, and you receive a pay-for-use bill. It’s not necessarily a function of a service, but a concept.

Today, we’re talking to Nitzan Shapira, co-founder and CEO of Epsagon, which brings observability to serverless Cloud applications by using distributed tracing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. He is a software engineer with experience in software development, cyber security, reverse engineering, and machine learning.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Modern renaissance of “functions as a service” compared to past history; is as abstracted as it can be, which means almost no constraints
• If you write your own software, ship it, and deploy it - it counts as serverless
• Some treat serverless as event-driven architecture where code swings into action
• When being strategic to make it more efficient, plan and develop an application with specific and complicated functioning
• Epsagon is a global observer for what the industry is doing and how it is implementing serverless as it evolves
• Trends and use cases include focusing on serverless first instead of the Cloud
• Economic Argument: Less expensive than running things all the time and offers ability to trace capital flow; but be cautious about unpredictable cost   
• Use bill to determine how much performance and flow time has been spent
• Companies seem to be trying to support every vendor’s serverless offering; when it comes to serverless, AWS Lambda appears to be used most often
• Not easy to move from one provider to another; on-premise misses the point
• People starting with AWS Lambda need familiarity with other services, which can be a reasonable but difficult barrier that’s worth the effort
• Managing serverless applications may have to be done through a third party
• Systemic view of how applications work focuses on overall health of a system, not individual function
• Epsagon is headquartered in Israel, along with other emerging serverless startups; Israeli culture fuels innovation

Links:

• Epsagon
• Email Nitzan Shapira
• Nitzan Shapira on Twitter
• Heroku
• Google App Engine
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• Lambda
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS X-Ray
• Simon Wardley
• Charity Majors
• Start-Up Nation
• Digital Ocean