Screaming in the Cloud

What is serverless? What do people want it to be? Serverless is when you write your software, deploy it to a Cloud vendor that will scale and run it, and you receive a pay-for-use bill. It’s not necessarily a function of a service, but a concept.
Today, we’re talking to Nitzan Shapira, co-founder and CEO of Epsagon, which brings observability to serverless Cloud applications by using distributed tracing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. He is a software engineer with experience in software development, cyber security, reverse engineering, and machine learning.
Some of the highlights of the show include:

Modern renaissance of “functions as a service” compared to past history; is as abstracted as it can be, which means almost no constraints
If you write your own software, ship it, and deploy it - it counts as serverless
Some treat serverless as event-driven architecture where code swings into action
When being strategic to make it more efficient, plan and develop an application with specific and complicated functioning
Epsagon is a global observer for what the industry is doing and how it is implementing serverless as it evolves
Trends and use cases include focusing on serverless first instead of the Cloud
Economic Argument: Less expensive than running things all the time and offers ability to trace capital flow; but be cautious about unpredictable cost   
Use bill to determine how much performance and flow time has been spent
Companies seem to be trying to support every vendor’s serverless offering; when it comes to serverless, AWS Lambda appears to be used most often
Not easy to move from one provider to another; on-premise misses the point
People starting with AWS Lambda need familiarity with other services, which can be a reasonable but difficult barrier that’s worth the effort
Managing serverless applications may have to be done through a third party
Systemic view of how applications work focuses on overall health of a system, not individual function
Epsagon is headquartered in Israel, along with other emerging serverless startups; Israeli culture fuels innovation

Links:

Epsagon
Email Nitzan Shapira
Nitzan Shapira on Twitter
Heroku
Google App Engine
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Lambda
Amazon CloudWatch
AWS X-Ray
Simon Wardley
Charity Majors
Start-Up Nation
Digital Ocean

Show Notes

What is serverless? What do people want it to be? Serverless is when you write your software, deploy it to a Cloud vendor that will scale and run it, and you receive a pay-for-use bill. It’s not necessarily a function of a service, but a concept.

Today, we’re talking to Nitzan Shapira, co-founder and CEO of Epsagon, which brings observability to serverless Cloud applications by using distributed tracing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. He is a software engineer with experience in software development, cyber security, reverse engineering, and machine learning.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

  • Modern renaissance of “functions as a service” compared to past history; is as abstracted as it can be, which means almost no constraints
  • If you write your own software, ship it, and deploy it - it counts as serverless
  • Some treat serverless as event-driven architecture where code swings into action
  • When being strategic to make it more efficient, plan and develop an application with specific and complicated functioning
  • Epsagon is a global observer for what the industry is doing and how it is implementing serverless as it evolves
  • Trends and use cases include focusing on serverless first instead of the Cloud
  • Economic Argument: Less expensive than running things all the time and offers ability to trace capital flow; but be cautious about unpredictable cost   
  • Use bill to determine how much performance and flow time has been spent
  • Companies seem to be trying to support every vendor’s serverless offering; when it comes to serverless, AWS Lambda appears to be used most often
  • Not easy to move from one provider to another; on-premise misses the point
  • People starting with AWS Lambda need familiarity with other services, which can be a reasonable but difficult barrier that’s worth the effort
  • Managing serverless applications may have to be done through a third party
  • Systemic view of how applications work focuses on overall health of a system, not individual function
  • Epsagon is headquartered in Israel, along with other emerging serverless startups; Israeli culture fuels innovation

Links:

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What is Screaming in the Cloud?

Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn features conversations with domain experts in the world of Cloud Computing. Topics discussed include AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and the "why" behind how businesses are coming to think about the Cloud.