In addition to all the promising benefits and cost-saving opportunities serverless technologies provide, practice and research show that the new paradigm requires software architects to rethink their application designs.
Many serverless applications are built in an ad-hoc and incremental way, whereby most teams perform little to no regular assessment of their FaaS implementations and the runtime characteristics. Inconsistency issues are slowly sneaking into the architecture. Moreover, as services are likely to become even smaller, more short-lived and their compositions more complex, managing them can be tedious. A real-time insight into the deployed serverless architecture provides tremendous benefits. This is particularly true, if you are aiming for performance and cost-saving improvements.
While having such a need for an application deployed on OpenWhisk, we took a novel approach and created the OpenWhisk-Visualizer (OWVIS). It allows teams to explore the architecture from a birds-eye perspective of a 3D-Map and helps to identify potential improvements.
In this talk we want to share our journey’s learnings, how we extracted the necessary runtime data and used it to point out improvements. We want to inspire you to also take an exploratory flight through your serverless system for better architecture discussions and decisions.