Welcome to the second edition of Serverless from the Trenches, our series of bite-sized blog posts aimed at developers and DevOps working in serverless. Each article will focus on a different technique or tool to solve a real-world problem and – hopefully – help make your work in serverless more productive. This week we look at how to add Cognito to your integration tests flow, making for true black box testing.

Just starting out with Dashbird? Great, you are in the right place. I’ve been speaking with hundreds of our new users in the past couple for months about their experience with Dashbird. I must say the feedback has been incredible so far. However, there are a few things I’ve noticed that our users haven’t yet taken advantage of within the platform. For a better success, let me point them out to you.

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.

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.

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.

One of the biggest challenges when adopting serverless today is mastering the developer workflow. “How do I develop locally?”, “How should I test?”, “Should I mock AWS services?”. These are common serverless questions, and the answers out there have been unsatisfying. Until now.

Twistlock is a platform for managing security and compliance within various environments, including virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions. Ensuring legal and technical security is just as valuable as preventing outages and errors, which is why Datadog is delighted to announce a new integration with Twistlock. With this integration, you can track security and compliance risks within the same platform as the metrics, traces, and logs you already collect with Datadog.