Being a UI developer, I’ve learned one thing: It doesn’t matter how carefully you write your code. Suppose you’ve double-checked that you defined and called all functions the right way or followed all the best practices. Even then you’ll see that a tiny variable can sneak behind and create an error. Now, suppose you find out that for some unknown reason a form validation or submit button isn’t working.
Software developers and software architects have, for a very long time, stood on opposite sides of the “whose is better” competition. They have completely different beliefs, with each vowing that theirs is the correct one. Some swear by Java as the holy grail of backend; some worship Go as the right solution to all your backend problems. But, really, is there one right answer? Apart from the tools that you use, the architecture you will be using differs from company to company.
We’ve been working on something big. We’re building Request Metrics, a new service for web performance monitoring. TrackJS is a fantastic tool to understand web page errors, but what if your pages aren’t broken, just slow? What if the checkout page takes 10 seconds to load? What if that user API is slowing down from your recent database change? What pages have the worst user experience? Request Metrics will tell you that.
If you take a long hard look at the DevOps movement, you will find it actually divides neatly into two sub-movements. The bigger and often noisier of the two is about technology, advocating for the latest and the greatest tools and techniques, be they Cloud, CI/CD, Serverless, or Containers. The smaller sister, however, is much different, stemming from Management Theorem and focusing more on processes.
While developing your serverless functions, debugging may become cumbersome because you are now dealing with a black box compute service that provides log lines after the execution is finished. You might get lost in the logs. Redeploying and trying again with different parameters over and over can be a tedious process. AWS SAM CLI’s local debugging capabilities are really helpful at this point. However, simulating the AWS Lambda environment in your local might not be what you want always.
Serverless eased the job of delivering software faster but the developers lost the ability to debug applications as they could do for monolithic applications. The comfort of debugging monolithic applications is behind and serverless developers left only with the logs that provide a limited post-debugging experience. You can debug your serverless application if you’re prepared enough for logging the required information.
Last week the Rookout team, myself among them, participated in and sponsored the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference in New York. New York is a city I personally love - the energy, the food, and the views are always top notch- there’s really just no comparison to the city that never sleeps. On top of that, I had the opportunity to mingle with some of the brightest minds in software architecture from many of the most successful companies in the world.
Ever feel like the world is moving by so rapidly, that it feels like something got left behind in the rush? That’s how we feel about being able to debug your applications easily. Technology has advanced rapidly, but the ease of debugging has not. With the introduction of serverless computing, the way enterprises are designed and how they build their production applications was changed.
