Lumigo offers visual map inside serverless apps
Lumigo, a Tel Aviv based startup, has announced the release of its serverless intelligence platform for developers.
Software application developers with an appreciation for the higher (cloudier) architectural surroundings that their application lives in will obviously want to be able to monitor, troubleshoot and optimize serverless applications — that’s what Lumigo offers.
As we have explained here, in a serverless computing architecture, software programmers (and the operations teams they work with) do not need to spend time worrying about setting up, tuning and scaling applications to work in a certain way – that’s all looked after at the backend is looked by the cloud provider.
Lumigo claims that serverless adoption is ‘skyrocketing’, with growth estimated at 300% per quarter… although no substantiation or validation was made for this figure that the company puts forward.
The firm does say that development speed, minimal maintenance and cost reduction are driving serverless as new startups build pure serverless applications and large companies start migrating existing applications to serverless.
Inherently distributed
Serverless applications are inherently highly distributed; a single request can trigger dozens of distributed services and functions, making it much harder and time-consuming to understand the big picture.
Developers often feel that moving to serverless means giving up too much visibility and control, making it difficult to identify and respond to issues.
Live visual map
Lumigo’s serverless intelligence platform is meant to provide the eyes and ears inside serverless applications. The company’s software creates a live visual map that gives developers visibility to monitor and troubleshoot requests inside serverless applications.
It follows a request from the entry point through the various serverless functions and services, connecting disjointed log events into a full picture of what happened, how long each step took and where the problems are.
“We’re witnessing a radical transformation in the way developers build cloud applications,” said Erez Berkner CEO and co-founder of Lumigo. “The Lumigo platform accelerates this transformation by allowing developers to operate their serverless applications smoothly and with confidence, overcoming the serverless-specific runtime challenges.”
One drawback of true serverless apps is that they don’t really exist beyond a series of services that could be in different cloud providers, languages and regions.
Correlation consternation
That (above) truth makes it very hard to follow a single transaction through the application from an initial request through to the end. Each service might have its own logs, but there’s no simple way to correlate them to understand what’s happening. This quickly becomes a problem for a busy app.
No visibility means, of course, that it’s hard to troubleshoot when something goes wrong. That’s especially the case because the service that breaks (eg a function timing out) might not be the root cause of the issue (malformed data, another function locking up a database, etc).
The fear of losing visibility is discouraging some companies from going serverless.
Lumigo claims to solves this problem by essentially creating ‘transactions’, connecting requests and logs between cloud services and serverless functions. The company now offers a free sign-up to its platform.