This document discusses monitoring AWS Lambda functions. It provides an overview of AWS Lambda, important concepts like triggers and statelessness. It also covers best practices, examples of AWS Lambda usage, and how to add monitoring. Specifically, it recommends adding a line to CloudWatch logs to report metrics to monitoring systems like Datadog. The speaker then demonstrates creating and monitoring a sample AWS Lambda function.

1. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Matt Williams - Evangelist @ Datadog
November 29, 2016
Monitoring, Hold the Infrastructure
Getting the Most from AWS Lambda

2. The Plan
Learn about the basics of AWS Lambda
Add AWS Lambda to your infrastructure
Monitoring 101 (the tl;dr version)
Monitoring AWS Lambda

3. What is AWS Lambda
The next stage in a long progression...
physical
boxes
virtual
machines
on
physical
boxes
containers lambda
AWS
instances

4. Important AWS Lambda Concepts
TRIGGER
BASED

5. Important AWS Lambda Concepts
STATELESS
STATELESS

6. Important AWS Lambda Concepts
SERVERLESS
AS FAR AS YOU ARE CONCERNED

7. Important AWS Lambda Concepts
Each event will trigger a new Lambda function
There is a safety limit per region of 100
(contact support for changes)

8. What is a AWS Lambda Function
• Your executable code
• No restrictions
• Priced based on execution time, quantity, and memory

9. What can trigger AWS Lambda?
Files Amazon S3
Database Updates Amazon DynamoDB
Streams Amazon Kinesis
Messages Amazon SNS, Amazon SES
User Data & Authentication Amazon Cognito
Infrastructure Changes AWS CloudFormation
Logs, Events, Metrics Amazon CloudWatch
IoT Echo, Amazon API Gateway

10. LambdaLambda Lambda Lambda
$goad

11. http://benchling.engineering/crispr-aws-lambda/

12. Other Examples
Bittorrent Tracker
Hugely scalable using S3
https://blog.zappa.io/posts/zappa-bittorrent-
tracker
Chat Bots
Easy to build
https://claudiajs.com/claudia-bot-builder.html
S3 Data Loading
Simpler than the typical Kinesis process
https://www.trek10.com/blog/serverless-
architectures-s3-data-loading/
Skills for the Amazon Echo
Make one today in the hall

13. Best Practices from AWS
Write stateless code
Local vars
Permissions
Minimize startup
Monitor
Delete old functions

14. Adding AWS Lambda
to your infrastructure

15. How to Create a AWS Lambda Function
1.Write the code
2.Setup on AWS
3.Debug

16. AWS Lambda Demo

28. Frameworks
node-lambda

29. Native Gotchas
Lambda runs on an Amazon Linux container
…and your dev box probably isn’t Amazon Linux…
…so native NPM modules are problematic

30. Native npm
1. Launch an Amazon Linux ec2
2. Use a node version manager
3. Install node 4.3
4. Install the native modules you need
5. Package the modules and dl to your box
6. Deploy

31. Building the demo with node-lambda
Four files:
• package.json
• .env
• event.json
• index.js

45. Monitoring 101
the tl;dr version

48. Collecting data is
cheap

49. Collecting data is
cheap;
Not having it when you
need it can be
expensive

57. Monitoring AWS Lambda

58. What are the AWS Lambda Metrics
aws.lambda.duration, min, max, sum
aws.lambda.errors
aws.lambda.invocations
aws.lambda.throttles

59. Three Options for Monitoring AWS Lambda
1. Add a custom metric to CloudWatch
2. Add metric directly to monitoring application
3. Add a line to the CloudWatch logs

60. How Datadog Does It
Add line to CloudWatch logs:
MONITORING|unix_epoch_timestamp|value|type|
my.metric.name|#tag1:value,tag2

61. Monitoring example

62. Monitoring example

63. Monitoring example

64. Monitoring example

67. Matt Williams
Evangelist - Datadog
mattw@datadoghq.com
@technovangelist
Twitter: @list