Introduction to Serverless Monitoring

Serverless models allow cloud providers to fully manage the provisioning and
allocation of servers, as well as run applications in a stateless, ephemeral
container when triggered by an event. This is incredibly useful for companies to be
able to only charge customers for the time a function is running as well as for
companies with unpredictable traffic because they don�t have to pay for idle
resources. In our Introduction to Serverless Monitoring Refcard, you�ll get an
introduction to serverless computing and monitoring, learn how serverless can play
a role in IoT and machine learning, see how monitoring and observability differ,
and more.

Built for straightforward debugging and observability, Thundra lets you quickly
analyze serverless applications and external services with correlated metrics,
logs, and traces. Detect, debug and troubleshoot your serverless applications
without a hassle and get back to coding!

TABLE OF CONTENTS
? Introduction to Serverless Computing

SECTION 1
Introduction to Serverless Computing
Cloud migration has enabled software companies to outsource their old-school, in-
house servers to cloud providers thanks to an infrastructure-as-a-service approach.
After that, IT admins and operations people continued to manage the provisioning,
patching, and securing of their cloud servers.

Eventually, cloud providers came up with a new cloud execution model where they
fully manage the provisioning and the allocation of these servers. In this model,
called function-as-a-service or serverless, cloud vendors run your applications in
a stateless, ephemeral container when triggered by an event.

There are many different event triggers, such as a direct API call, a message
written to a queue, a signal sent by an IoT device, and so on. FaaS arose as a
business model thanks to its pay-as-you-go billing method. With this, cloud
providers charge their customers only for the time the function is running. This is
particularly useful for companies that have unpredictable traffic because they can
scale automatically, and they don't pay for idle resources.

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AWS announced its Lambda service as a FaaS solution back in November 2014. Azure
and Google Cloud Functions followed in early 2016 and March 2017 respectively.

However, in exchange for the pay-as-you-go service and simplicity in operations,

software developers lost the ability to monitor their serverless applications. This
is due to developers uploading their code onto cloud platforms that do not provide
access and control of the cloud-based environment. This Refcard looks into
challenges of monitoring and observability within serverless architectures and
explains how a monitoring system for a serverless architecture can be implemented.

Built for straightforward debugging and observability, Thundra lets you quickly
analyze serverless applications and external services with correlated metrics,
logs, and traces. Detect, debug and troubleshoot your serverless applications
without a hassle and get back to coding!