The Great Irony of Serverless Computing

Working with Serverless computing is like riding an electric bike. You get speed, flexibility, automatic assistance to scale with ease. Development is usually hassle-free because you can focus on code and only pay for usage of the service. Except when your users hit an error. Debugging that issue feels like your bike’s battery just died while climbing a steep hill.

Developers are limited to debugging Serverless errors by infinitely scrolling through logs via an experience that wasn’t designed to accommodate the use case. So… saving time on spinning up services only to spend it on debugging issues feels a bit ironic, don’t you think? We agree.

Sentry now provides code-level visibility for Serverless projects with stack traces on issues, user-agent information, and all the metadata around an issue — giving developers all the context they need to resolve the issue.

You’ll be able to fill the gaps of what happened leading up to the issue and quickly see the function execution details including function metadata, execution time, ARN, and function identity. Also, like Hansel and Gretel, we leave you breadcrumbs to see the sequence of events, even function timeouts, that led to the error. (Don’t worry, birds cannot eat these breadcrumbs.)

Update our SDKs for Python (GCP, AWS Lambda) and/or Node (GCP, AWS Lambda). You’ll start capturing errors and all the relevant information to resolve them in minutes.

In the event you need just a little more information, Sentry will deep-link to CloudWatch or Stackdriver logs right from the issue details screen.

Serverless computing is growing in adoption quite rapidly. According to RightScale, 75% of companies have either adopted Serverless or are trying it out. Fifty-three percent of Serverless Community Survey respondents say that serverless is critical to their job.

Removing the overhead of managing and provisioning backend services is a dream. Until now, debugging Lambda functions or Google Cloud functions has been kind of a nightmare.

Install our new SDKs for Python and Node to realize all the benefits of speed, scalability, and of course, working code from using Serverless computing.

As always, we'd appreciate your feedback. Send a note to sentry-for-serverless@sentry.io and I promise a human will respond.