Observing all the Serverless Things

Have you ever thought that your Lambda functions could fail without you even noticing? If the answer is YES, that’s probably because you already “got burned" by playing with the cloud, where errors and failures are always around the corner. Unfortunately, we can’t prevent all types of failures, but what we can do is try to spot them as soon as possible and react quickly. In order to do that, we need good observability for our serverless applications and therefore we need to become familiar with services like CloudWatch. If you have tried CloudWatch already, you probably know how powerful but also complex it can be. In this talk, we will approach the topic of observability for serverless applications on AWS. We will discuss best practices and how to be effective with CloudWatch. We will also present our open source tool-kit for observability 'SLIC Watch' which automates away most of the pain of setting up dashboards and alarms in CloudWatch, making it easier to achieve great levels of observability.