SERVERLESS LOGGING WITH
ELK
Edoardo Paolo Scalafiotti - Software Engineer @ Sainsbury’s

About me
Go, NodeJS
SPAs, WebComponents
Material Design
Serverless Architecture
Microservices
Machine Learning
FabLab, Meetups

Agenda
OVERVIEW
WHY SERVERLESS?
CHALLENGES
USE CASES
DEMO
Q & A

WHAT IS SERVERLESS?

TL;DR
FaaS is about running back end code without
managing your own server systems or your own
server applications

applications that run in stateless compute
containers that are event-triggered,
ephemeral and fully managed by a 3rd party

● 2 overlapping areas: BaaS and PaaS
● run code without provisioning or managing
servers
● horizontal scaling is completely automatic,
elastic, and managed by the provider
● responds to triggers

WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

serverless is
HOT!

Typical servers in business and enterprise data
centers deliver between 5 and 15 percent of
their maximum computing output on average
over the course of the year

● Reduced operational cost
● Good with irregular, high spike traffic that
cannot be handled by auto-scaling
● Promotes best coding practises

WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES?

TL;DR
not for the faint-hearted... at the moment

● Ugly hacks for keeping the function alive
● Vendor lock-in
● Unit testing is ok, integration... another story
● Repetition of logic
● Concurrent limit
● Logging, Monitoring and Debugging

USE CASES

USE WISELY
FaaS, containers and VMs are not enemies

FAAS is seen as a better choice for
event-driven apps with few event types per
application component,
while CONTAINERS are seen as a better choice
for synchronous-request driven components
with many entry points

VM Containers Serverless
Configure
machines,
storage,
networking and
OS
Run servers,
configure
applications and
control scaling
Run my code
when it’s
needed

Use cases:
● Real-time file processing (ingestion)
● Real-time stream processing (mkt. data)
● Extract, Transform, Load
● IoT Backends
● Mobile Backends
● RESTful APIs

● Open Source alternative: IBM’s OpenWhisk
● API Orchestration: serverless.com and
claudia.js
● Multiple PL support: Apex
● Logging and monitoring: ELK

LET’S GET TO THE CODE...

THE MISSION
...is to monitor a set of Lambda-based
functions that generates
Game Of Thrones plot points

DEMO

github.com/edoardo849/lot