Monitoring platform for keeping systems up and running at all times.
Full stack visibility across the entire stack.
Detect and resolve any incident in record time.
Conform to industry best practices.
Yessiree Bob, you heard that right. The next big step towards the future of e-commerce is serverless technology. The e-commerce space has, for years, been in need of an alternative to the regular hosts as they are really not really viable passed a certain point, mainly because of this two reason:
Anybody that ran a business selling goods or services online(or offline) knows that margins are everything and every penny you spend will cut into those margins, hurting your business. What usually happens is that store owners calculate the pricing of their products based on the manufacturing costs, shipping and marketing leaving very little overhead for the infrastructure. So when they inevitably decide to spend more on ads, they don’t really expect that they have to spend more on hosting.
The more people see the ad, the more traffic your sites get. More traffic = bigger servers. It’s that simple.
Image credit to getshifter.io
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that you’ll need to support your growing base of customers and to do so you need a server who can accommodate a large number of concurrent users. This is done through various methods but none are perfect and prone to errors. Truth be told, regular serves just don’t scale gracefully and making them do so requires a lot of attention and a lot more money.
Serverless will get you the graceful scaling that your store needs while keeping the costs down.
Whenever the serverless discussion comes up when I’m around “e-commerce people” I always use a cautionary tale about this German show called Dragon Den in which budding entrepreneurs get three minutes to pitch their business ideas to five multi-millionaires willing to invest their own cash. In one of the more recent episodes, a guy walked in with an interesting idea but as soon as he started talking about the website everyone jumped on the website and before the investors got a chance to see the site it had crashed.
You’d think this is something that most websites won’t go through but you’d be surprised how many store owners struggle with this very problem. And before you ask, no, this is not a problem that only small websites with cheap hosting have. This is such a problem that even the likes of Bestbuy or Cabela have faced and let me tell you, losing a couple hundred thousand dollars because your website goes down on Black Friday ain’t pretty. Somebody is getting yelled at in the morning!
Poor website performance is now measured in terms of lost customers and revenues – Tom Lounibos, CEO, SOASTA
Now that’s a phrase with an odd ring to it yet there’s a hard truth behind it. Moving your operations to the cloud hasn’t really been an option before now but we’ve seen Zalora doing it, and I’ll link to a case study talking about just that. We’ve seen an increasing number of smaller companies moving their shops on AWS and never looking back. And why should they? With lower costs, better scaling and without the constant, impending doom of your website crashing exactly when it’s not supposed to (and for the sake of argument, the time to have your website crash is never!).
For anyone thinking that this might be a terribly hard thing to do here’s a simple tutorial on how to build your e-commerce store on a serverless platform. This example uses Stripe and AWS Lambda to run your entire operation but of course, and while it is a simple version of what you’ll end up using it’s still, a fully functioning store in 5 minutes. That is remarkable!
We aim to improve Dashbird every day and user feedback is extremely important for that, so please let us know if you have any feedback about these improvements and new features! We would really appreciate it!
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Today we are announcing a new, updated pricing model and the end of free tier for Dashbird.
In this article, we’re covering 4 tips for AWS Lambda optimization for production. Covering error handling, memory provisioning, monitoring, performance, and more.
In this article we’ll go through the ins and outs of AWS Lambda pricing model, how it works, what additional charges you might be looking at and what’s in the fine print.
Dashbird was born out of our own need for an enhanced serverless debugging and monitoring tool, and we take pride in being developers.
Dashbird gives us a simple and easy to use tool to have peace of mind and know that all of our Serverless functions are running correctly. We are instantly aware now if there’s a problem. We love the fact that we have enough information in the Slack notification itself to take appropriate action immediately and know exactly where the issue occurred.
Thanks to Dashbird the time to discover the occurrence of an issue reduced from 2-4 hours to a matter of seconds or minutes. It also means that hundreds of dollars are saved every month.
Great onboarding: it takes just a couple of minutes to connect an AWS account to an organization in Dashbird. The UI is clean and gives a good overview of what is happening with the Lambdas and API Gateways in the account.
I mean, it is just extremely time-saving. It’s so efficient! I don’t think it’s an exaggeration or dramatic to say that Dashbird has been a lifesaver for us.
Dashbird provides an easier interface to monitor and debug problems with our Lambdas. Relevant logs are simple to find and view. Dashbird’s support has been good, and they take product suggestions with grace.
Great UI. Easy to navigate through CloudWatch logs. Simple setup.
Dashbird helped us refine the size of our Lambdas, resulting in significantly reduced costs. We have Dashbird alert us in seconds via email when any of our functions behaves abnormally. Their app immediately makes the cause and severity of errors obvious.