Episode 24: Serverless Observability via the bill is terrible

What is serverless? What do people want it to be? Serverless is when you write your software, deploy it to a Cloud vendor that will scale and run it, and you receive a pay-for-use bill. It’s not necessarily a function of a service, but a concept. Today, we’re talking to Nitzan Shapira, co-founder and CEO of Epsagon, which brings observability to serverless Cloud applications by using distributed tracing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. He is a software engineer with experience in software development, cyber security, reverse engineering, and machine learning. Some of the highlights of the show include: Modern renaissance of “functions as a service” compared to past history; is as abstracted as it can be, which means almost no constraints If you write your own software, ship it, and deploy it - it counts as serverless Some treat serverless as event-driven architecture where code swings into action When being strategic to make it more efficient, plan and develop an application with specific and complicated functioning Epsagon is a global observer for what the industry is doing and how it is implementing serverless as it evolves Trends and use cases include focusing on serverless first instead of the Cloud Economic Argument: Less expensive than running things all the time and offers ability to trace capital flow; but be cautious about unpredictable cost    Use bill to determine how much performance and flow time has been spent Companies seem to be trying to support every vendor’s serverless offering; when it comes to serverless, AWS Lambda appears to be used most often Not easy to move from one provider to another; on-premise misses the point People starting with AWS Lambda need familiarity with other services, which can be a reasonable but difficult barrier that’s worth the effort Managing serverless applications may have to be done through a third party Systemic view of how applications work focuses on overall health of a system, not individual function Epsagon is headquartered in Israel, along with other emerging serverless startups; Israeli culture fuels innovation Links: Epsagon Email Nitzan Shapira Nitzan Shapira on Twitter Heroku Google App Engine AWS Elastic Beanstalk Lambda Amazon CloudWatch AWS X-Ray Simon Wardley Charity Majors Start-Up Nation Digital Ocean