Episode 24: Serverless Observability via the bill is terrible
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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)

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