10/07/2021 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 10/07/2021 01:35
For many companies, the journey to modern cloud applications starts with serverless. While these serverless services provide strong business benefits due to their flexible on-demand usage and pricing model, they also introduce new complexities for observability.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), offers a wide range of serverless solutions. To get a better understanding of AWS serverless, we'll first explore the basics of serverless architectures, review AWS serverless offerings, and explore common use cases. We will also discuss how you can ensure observability in serverless environments. Let's get started.
Serverless architecture shifts application hosting functions away from local servers onto those managed by providers. This means you no longer have to provision, scale, and maintain servers to run your applications, databases, and storage systems.
While function-as-a-service (FaaS) serverless architecture is similar to platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, there's a significant difference: PaaS applications are typically deployed as single units, whereas serverless applications are broken down into functions, each of which is hosted by your provider.
Serverless architecture offers several benefits for enterprises.
Simplicity. The first benefit is simplicity. Instead of worrying about infrastructure management functions, such as capacity provisioning and hardware maintenance, teams can focus on application design, deployment, and delivery.
Speed. Speed is next; serverless solutions are quick to spin up or down as needed, and there are no delays due to limited storage or resource access.
Reliability. Serverless solutions are also more reliable than their traditional application counterparts. Since apps are hosted as interconnected functions in the cloud they're naturally redundant and less prone to unexpected failure.
Scalability. Finally, there's scalability. Using a FaaS model makes it possible to scale up individual application functions as needed rather than increase total resource allocation for your entire application, which helps reduce total resource costs and improve overall app efficiency.
Amazon divides its serverless solutions into three broad categories with 12 specific services. But which are the best fit for your business, and where do they make the most sense in your serverless application stack? Let's explore each in more detail.
Amazon compute solutions are designed to streamline resource provisioning and container management with two services:
Amazon's application integration services form the bulk of its serverless offerings with six solutions designed to streamline the interconnection of application functions.
As data volumes rapidly increase, streamlined data storage is a top priority. AWS offers four serverless offerings for storage.
While leveraging Amazon's suite of serverless services makes it possible to take on almost any IT task without increasing in-house complexity, it's worth examining four common use cases to explore how these services work in concert.
Serverless solutions from Amazon are often used to underpin critical application functions. By leveraging Lambda and the API Gateway for business logic - combined with DynamoDB for streamlined data store - organizations can create purpose-built, event-driven application back-ends that empower front-end functions.
By combining Lambda, S3, SQS, SNS, and DynamoDB, organizations can develop and deploy general-purpose, event-driven parallel processing architectures to deliver real-time file processing, analysis, and output.
Tools such as Lambda and SNS enable better batch processing, which makes it possible to quickly download, upload, and process files - and then automatically send notifications to IT teams.
By pairing Lambda and SQS with AWS machine learning services, such as Amazon Rekognition and Comprehend, organizations can create serverless document repositories that offer fast indexing and simplified search.
While AWS serverless solutions offer a solid framework for resource distribution, application management, and storage provision, the sheer number of interconnected solutions leveraged by enterprises to deliver on use case scenarios comes with its own challenge: observability.
Although individual Amazon services are typically transparent, once they become parts of a larger whole, it's easy for IT teams to lose track of what's happening. Services can span multiple cloud providers and connections, making it more difficult to discern where and when specific transactions happen, which increases overall complexity.
The Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform provides seamless observability of AWS serverless services across the full hybrid-cloud stack and multicloud platforms. Dynatrace has partnered with Amazon to be part of the future AWS distro for OpenTelemetry deployments to deliver enhanced visibility across serverless stacks.
Dynatrace has also developed new extensions for Lambda and intelligent operations for both EKS and Fargate, which deliver automatic observability in context with the other services, hybrid-cloud resources, and cloud resources. In practice, Dynatrace's observability and AI-driven analysis of AWS serverless services in context with the full hybrid-cloud stack enable organizations to simplify cloud environments, streamline and optimize service architecture, and scale to meet evolving demands - without losing sight of critical operations.
To learn more about how Dynatrace can provide critical observability over all your AWS serverless initiatives, join us for our on-demand Power Demo AWS Observability with Serverless.