The Present and Future of Serverless Observability

As engineers, we're empowered by advancements in cloud platforms to build ever more complex systems that can achieve amazing feats at a scale previously only possible for the elite few. The monitoring tools have evolved over the years to accommodate our growing needs with these increasingly complex systems, but the emergence of serverless technologies like AWS Lambda has shifted the landscape and broken some of the underlying assumptions that existing tools are built upon - eg. you can no longer access the underlying host to install monitoring agents/daemons, and it's no longer feasible to use background threads to send monitoring data outside the critical path.

Furthermore, event-driven architectures has become easily accessible and widely adopted by those adopting serverless technologies, and this trend has added another layer of complexity with how we monitor and debug our systems as it involves tracing executions that flow through async invocations, and often fan'd-out and fan'd-in via various event processing patterns.

Join us in this talk as serverless expert Yan Cui gives us an overview of the challenges with observing a serverless architecture, the tradeoffs to consider, the current state of the tooling for serverless observability and a sneak peek at some of the new and coming tools that will hopefully inform us what the future of serverless observability might look like.