Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Some time ago, the Register published an article titled “Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in we’ve ever seen in the history of humanity”. It received a lot of attention, and vendor lock-in has become a perennially popular question at conferences. But I’m here to tell you that you are probably thinking about vendor lock-in all wrong when it comes to serverless.

Each year we eagerly await the publication of the RightScale (now Flexera) State of the Cloud report to see which technologies and players are trending in the cloud ecosystem. In this year’s report (2019) one of the interesting takeaways is that in 2018 public cloud spending grew three times faster than private cloud and companies intend to spend almost 25% more on public cloud in 2019 than they did in 2018.

I’m on the og-aws Slack group, one of the more active groups of AWS developers and cloud practitioners. A member of the channel, Samuell, asked a question about S3, Cloudfront, and new files, and I saw the perfect opportunity to help out, so I offered.

Last year we covered the top enterprise serverless use cases for AWS Lambda. To refresh our memory, according to the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), most commonly AWS Lambda is used for REST APIs, multimedia/image processing, CRON jobs, and stream processing. Today I’d like to cover some more complex ways some of our enterprise customers use Lambdas.

If you work in tech, you’ve probably heard that “team culture” is the most important thing for a successful organization. Camaraderie, trust, passion… a good team should have all that. And it’s hard to deny that loving the team you work with will make you more successful, but how do we build that? There’s no AWS product called TeamFront and it’s not sold on Amazon. How can we take camaraderie from elusive to undeniable?

When you’re working with EC2 or containers, VPCs have long been viewed as a must-have. Without them, you will face a constant barrage of attacks aimed at your infrastructure and OS, such as brute force login attacks. But are VPCs still needed when it comes to AWS Lambda? What do you actually get when you put a function inside a VPC? And what are the downsides?

As CEO and co-founder of IOpipe, Adam Johnson works with both individual developers and engineering teams at global enterprises to get real-time visibility into the detailed behaviors of their serverless applications. According to The New Stack’s 2018 ebook, serverless adoption has grown by 75 percent since 2017, but developers continue to cite concerns about application performance, risk, and monitoring as drawbacks to building on a serverless architecture.

AWS Beanstalk allows you to spin up entire environments (EC2 instances, ELBs, etc.) to support an application without you having to configure the resources manually. However, since it’s a managed service, you have less visibility with traditional monitoring tools. As such, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring tools in AWS. In this post, we’ll explain how to use CloudWatch to monitor Beanstalk and what is important to watch.

It’s time to talk about the everyday challenges of serverless. Whenever I scroll through the latest blog posts on serverless it feels like there are only two types of problems in the field: how do I get started and how do I architect my solution. But what about all the day-to-day problems that developers and DevOps encounter when dealing with serverless? From simple deployment issues like protecting your stack from deletion to stress-testing your solution using serverless techniques.

The second quarter of 2019 started with a bang for OpsRamp, with recognition from two independent analyst firms, 451 Research and IDC. Three recent analyst reports highlighted OpsRamp’s modern digital and IT operations management platform for dynamic performance insights and maximum visibility.