When Dedicated DevOps is Not Available

With the rise of cloud computing and modern distributed systems, we also witnessed the rise of a new practice area: DevOps.

Despite being fundamental for smooth cloud operations, a dedicated DevOps practitioner is a luxury most teams can’t afford. Salaries average $130K in San Francisco, for example.

When a dedicated DevOps practitioner is not available in our team, what should we do?

The answer could unfold a multitude of aspects. Below are two main areas we think every development team should give a good deal of thought:

Keep it simple

The KISS (keep it simple) principle, well-known among developers, also applies to infrastructure decisions.

End-users don’t really care about Docker, Kubernetes, servers, etc. As long as it meets the purpose. Not having a dedicated DevOps means you need an infrastructure as simple as it can get. Not the hottest tech necessarily.

Simplification releases time to create value for users. That’s how you’ll beat the competition.

Serverless is a relatively new cloud paradigm where infrastructure set up and management are shifted to the cloud provider’s hands. By using Lambda functions, for example, we are outsourcing most operational hassle to the AWS DevOps team. For pennies of a dollar. Do you think you have the budget to beat AWS in their own game? Think again…

That was precisely the case of a Dashbird customer: Blow Limited, a startup based in London. With a small team, they are growing fast in the beauty market. As you probably guessed, they are leveraging the power of serverless. Check out their case study here.

Monitor like a Pro

Serverless can abstract away most infrastructure management, but the application is still on our hands.

Our code may fail, networking could disrupt connection with a third-party API, databases can be a bottleneck. In other words: many things can still go wrong.

A proper monitoring tool is necessary to detect and alert of anything requiring attention or fixing, which reduces the average time to discovery of issues. This tool should also enable an efficient debugging process in order to reduce the average time to resolve issues.

Dashbird, for example, is the pioneer in serverless monitoring and has been monitoring hundreds of thousands of Lambda functions in the past years. Although AWS will provide CloudWatch as a standard monitoring tool, it still misses several important features. Think of Dashbird as your very own DevOps guy, working 24/7 and letting you know anything going wring in your application within seconds.

If you haven’t yet, you can start your free 14-day trial with Dashbird today and test out the premium features yourself. No credit card required.

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Made by developers for developers

Dashbird was born out of our own need for an enhanced serverless debugging and monitoring tool, and we take pride in being developers.

What our customers say

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.