Tracing the Black Box of Serverless

A presentation at Abstractions II in in Pittsburgh, PA, USA by Matt Williams

Serverless is often a black box. You write functions then they are invoked on a platform on which you have no real visibility. Sure, there are metrics and logs, but finding the bottlenecks is a huge challenge. Understanding how a function relates to other resources is just as tough. On AWS, a tool that solves these problems is X-Ray. In this talk, I will show you how you can use X-Ray to:

  • troubleshoot the more ornery issues with Lambda

  • get a better understanding of how functions are invoked

  • work with all 3 pillars of observability to get a complete view of your serverless infrastructure

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