The Challenges of Stateless Architecture and How to Monitor Your Serverless Application

Serverless apps are not without their challenges. Proactive monitoring to manage the new difficulties

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash.

So you decided to go serverless. Congrats! Welcome to the land of high availability, vertical and horizontal scalability, rapid development, and only paying for what you use.

Business functionality is the name of the game. Software engineers get to spend their time solving business problems instead of solving networking and infrastructure problems. Your application is going to have full focus from the development team.

But with serverless apps come some new and interesting challenges — challenges that were once solved problems like how to forecast application costs. Since your application is “pay for what you use,” how does that translate to the number of executions and compute time?

Other problems include how to test your application at scale. How do you test all those lambda functions, API Gateway endpoints, and SNS topics?

How about application health? You need to know if your application is up and running and doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Traditional development had an easy answer to this problem. Just add a health…