Debugging code is a skill every developer needs to acquire. As developers work on larger and more complex projects, debugging in the cloud before going to production has become crucial. Even debugging your code by mocking all of your cloud resources in your local environment may not prepare you for what will happen when millions of requests are being processed through that code in production.

To make matters more challenging, modern system architecture, like microservices, can make it more difficult to debug applications on cloud. Microservices help isolate different modules and their functions. …

Thundra provides rich auto-tracing out of the box to instrument AWS SDKs, infrastructure, and Lambda. Engineers can enhance the traces to provide additional business context. This enhancement is referred to as “logical” or custom spans, which help end users debug and understand performance in the context of business operations. Logical tracing isn’t difficult, but it does require custom instrumentation.

In this article, you’ll learn how logical spans are instrumented to provide additional business and operation context, when and how to perform the instrumentation, and how fine-grain trace spans are different from span tags. …

When it comes to container orchestration, everyone thinks “Kubernetes!” After all, this is what the cool kids do. But as you guessed from the title of this article, you might want to pause for a moment before jumping on the bandwagon. Indeed, Kubernetes has a (very) steep learning curve, a bewilderingly vast ecosystem, and a seemingly infinite landscape of third-party providers attempting to sell you some kind of “easy Kubernetes” (which in itself is a telltale sign of its complexity). At the end of the day, dealing with Kubernetes can be mind-numbing.

In this article, we’ll take a look at…

Choosing the right database has one of the most direct effects on the cost and performance of your application. A serverless environment is no exception to this principle. By considering parameters like access patterns, schema (data model), and expected performance, it’s possible to logically arrive at an optimal decision for your database type.

Databases, in general, have two broad classifications: SQL relational or normalized databases and NoSQL or denormalized databases. A third classification has also arisen for specific use cases like modeling graphs, in-memory caching systems among others.

But in this article we’ll explore certain aspects of SQL and NoSQL…

Serverless is great, it helps companies focus on product and application development without having to worry about the application’s infrastructure and scaling under various conditions.

However, there are some soft and hard limits for every AWS service you should need to keep in mind when developing a serverless application. These limits are meant to protect the customer as well as the provider against any unintentional use. As well as provide guardrails to ensure you are following best practices.

In this article, we will take a closer look at AWS Lambda limits and explain how to avoid them.

Deployment Package Limits

There is a…

What if My Third-Party APIs Respond Slower?

The distributed nature of serverless technology is both a strength and a weakness. On-demand hardware’s natural resilience and responsiveness make it a powerful tool for rapidly driving your application’s development and growth, solving many early headaches in scaling and security.

However, to implement this in AWS Lambda, you must make extensive use of remote calls to external servers via HTTP, triggers from event-producing AWS services, and other external communications to maintain your application state in the absence of a core server. …

After years of delivering and running high-scale, robust, and reliable applications on giant and complex infrastructures that we vigilantly maintained, someone told us that we didn’t need this capability anymore. Of course, I’m not talking about the applications that earn money on our behalf, or servers, which are hidden somewhere around the data centres. I’m talking about the need for maintaining servers. Someone with good intentions just wanted to take this burden off our shoulders.

Yes! We completely got rid of this need about five years ago. Back then, serverless wasn’t regarded as a suitable way of running high-scale applications…

How Do Regulatory Agencies View Serverless Applications?

As companies grow, one of the most significant changes they must make is to comply with government regulations. As a company takes on third-party shareholders and its actions come to affect those without a direct say in their planning, data security and compliance become more important.

Companies that don’t focus on compliance can be endangered by legal issues. The compliance process is often highly detailed, requiring extensive diagramming and documentation and the involvement of many of the most senior team members to field questions from regulators.

Because serverless applications remove the ability to point to a physical machine as proof…