Debugging Serverless Apps: from monitoring invocations to observing systems | Hacker News Reader

Debugging Serverless Apps: from monitoring invocations to observing systems

read.iopipe.com

70 pointsn0debotanist12 comments

We've recently been publishing a lot of information about Cloudflare's serverless platform (called Workers): https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/serverless/

This blog on bootstrapping a Worker using Typescript shows how slick development on the platform is: https://blog.cloudflare.com/bootstrapping-a-typescript-worke... and we'll be posting more in coming days about how to debug on the platform.

Identifying cold-starts is a huge win here, using something to keep your lambdas warm is important for user-facing functionality. That functionality alone makes a compelling feature.

Couldn't this be solved with CloudWatch events?

I don't really understand this - if you need to 'keep your lambdas warm' why not just run them as a process?

There seems to be a lot of book-keeping and ritual for something which is supposed to just let you focus on the important bits of code, without worrying about how it runs.

If you're already "serverless" (or want to be), it's not that easy to just "add a process". Usually if you're running a process, you're maintaining one or more virtual servers, which can be a lot more operational overhead than a Lambda.

Having said that, I agree that there seems to be an inordinate amount of effort/thought going into keeping Lambdas "warm" (i.e. always running).

I think the prevalence of these hijinks indicates that AWS Lambda should consider adding a "keep running" option that ensure the particular function is always "warm", but costs a bit more.

Azure Functions offer an Always On option under a premium tier of Azure App Service but I don't know be that'd I call that just "a bit more", especially at scale.

Might as well containerize it and accept the overhead of some maintenance to ensure the lowest cost guaranteed availability and performance.

It seems that'd be too expensive for AWS for a free tier. I really like the idea of serverless, it just doesnt seem to live up to the promise in its current implementations. Are they spinning up a server per function?

They could at least have a decent pricing. 299$ / Month for this is insulting knowing AWS X-Ray is built in Lambda and does it for Free.

Clearly I do not take any startups working in Serverless seriously if they don't have a serverless pricing themselves.

Serverless is not just Lambda. It's an entire philosphy and pricing model that goes with it . Here it's the exact opposite.

There's a free tier and we're happy to discussing pricing privately. Startups, individuals, open source projects are dear to our hearts and we want to make the product accessible to those that need it.

I agree. I have only just heard of this product, but can immediately see it would be extremely useful to me. Sadly, I can say 100% that I can not justify this kind of spend on a single operational analytics tool. For that reason, I probably won't even try it.

Yeah, except X-Ray doesn't actually do a whole lot for you.

If the product from iopipe does more, then they should be able to charge more for it.

Whether it's worth $299/month more is an open question, however.

At least they could also have serverless pricing.

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