Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Systems run into problems all the time. To keep things running smoothly, we need to have an error monitoring and logging system to help us discover and resolve whatever issue that may arise as soon as possible. The bigger the system the more challenging it becomes to monitor it and pinpoint the issue. And with serverless systems with 100s of services running concurrently, monitoring and troubleshooting are even more challenging tasks.

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While we know the many benefits of going serverless – reduced costs via pay-per-use pricing models, less operational burden/overhead, instant scalability, increased automation – the challenges of going serverless are often not addressed as comprehensively. The understandable concerns over migrating can stop any architectural decisions and actions being made for fear of getting it wrong and not having the right resources.

Logs are an essential part of an effective monitoring strategy, as they provide granular information about activity that occurs anywhere in your system. In serverless environments, however, you have no access to the infrastructure that supports your applications, so you must rely entirely on logs from individual AWS services when troubleshooting performance issues.

We’ve seen time and again how serverless architecture can benefit your application; graceful scaling, cost efficiency, and a fast production time are just some of the things you think of when talking about serverless. But what about serverless security? What do I need to do to ensure my application is not prone to attacks? One of the many companies that do serverless security, Protego, came up with an analogy I really like.

Inevitably, in the lifetime of a service or application, developers, DevOps, and SREs will need to investigate the cause of latency. Usually you will start by determining whether it is the application or the underlying infrastructure causing the latency. You have to look for signals that indicate the performance of those resources when the issue occured.

I have been in the IT industry for a few decades now and have helped launch waves of technology in the constant pursuit of making computing easier, cheaper and with greater uptime. This all started well before my entry into the IT industry and will continue to well past the time I retire. However, it is always good to understand where we have been and look how far we have come to understand how we can continue to make it even better.

Handling large images has always been a pain in my side since I started writing code. Lately, it has started to have a huge impact on page speed and SEO ranking. If your website has poorly optimized images it won’t score well on Google Lighthouse. If it doesn’t score well, it won’t be on the first page of Google. That sucks.