Build Systems that Drive Business
30–31 Oct 2018: Training
31 Oct–2 Nov 2018: Tutorials & Conference
London, UK

How to build observability into a serverless application

Yan Cui (DAZN)
16:3517:15 Thursday, 1 November 2018
Serverless
Location: Park Suite (St. James / Regents)
Secondary topics:  Systems Monitoring & Orchestration
Average rating: ****.
(4.67, 3 ratings)

Prerequisite knowledge

  • Familiarity with serverless technologies, such as AWS Lambda and API Gateway

What you'll learn

  • Learn how to build observability into a serverless application

Description

Serverless introduces a number of challenges to existing tools for observability: there’s nowhere to install monitoring agents or daemons, no background processing, higher concurrency to monitoring systems, and lots more asynchronous invocations. As a result, you need to adapt your practices to fit this new paradigm.

Yan Cui explains how to build observability into a serverless application, demonstrating how to implement log aggregation, distributed tracing, and correlation IDs through both synchronous and asynchronous events.

Topics include:

  • How to implement log aggregation
  • The need for structured logging and sampling debug logs in production
  • How to capture and forward correlation IDs through both synchronous (API Gateway) as well as asynchronous (SNS, Kinesis, S3, etc.) invocation events
  • How to capture performance traces to help debug performance issues
Photo of Yan Cui

Yan Cui

DAZN

Yan Cui is a principal engineer at DAZN and an AWS serverless hero. Over his career, he has been an architect and lead developer with a variety of industries ranging from investment banks, ecommerce to mobile gaming. In the last two years, he has worked extensively with AWS Lambda in production, and he has been very active in sharing his experiences and the lessons he has learned.

Yan is polyglot in both spoken and programming languages and counts C#, F#, Scala, Node.js, and Erlang among the programming languages he has worked with professionally. Yan is a regular speaker at user groups and conferences internationally and is the instructor of Production-Ready Serverless and a coauthor of F# Deep Dives. In his spare time, he keeps an active blog at theburningmonk.com.