Fastly adds greater functionality to serverless computing solution

Fastly, a global edge cloud platform company, has added new observability features to its Compute@Edge serverless compute environment solution.

Compute@Edge helps companies build applications and execute code on its globally distributed infrastructure without having to manage it directly.

The new features bring customisable logging, real-time and historical metrics, and end to end request visibility to organisations to give developers greater transparency into what happens after code is deployed within a serverless architecture.

The features also offer mission-critical visibility needed to find and fix operational issues quickly, the company states.

Customisable logging enables developers to send real-time logs to 27 supported endpoints and counting. Developers have access to automatically-exposed default log fields, and can also capture custom event details that meet their business needs.

Having access to log data helps developers determine the root cause of a host of potential issues, from infrastructure to end-user, Fastly states.

Real-time and historical metrics for the likes of CPU and RAM utilisation lets developers explore data as it happens or in historical analysis.

This increased visibility allows developers to better monitor application performance and react in real time to keep a site online, which can support revenue and a better end-user experience, according to Fastly.

End-to-end request visibility allows developers to tag individual end-user requests with unique identifiers, helping illuminate any blind spots in multi-technology infrastructures and providing details on the requests lifetime.

Users can pass this information along to third-party systems like Datadog that help with data visualisation, and to conduct further, tailored analysis.

Fastly CTO Tyler McMullen says, "At Fastly, we think observability should go beyond logging and monitoring to also provide the context and data needed to answer crucial questions about serverless performance and, ultimately, an end users experience.

"In addition to concerns about cold start times, observability has been a top apprehension with serverless among developers. With Compute@Edge, we solved for the first concern with a 100x faster startup time than any other solution in the market.

"Now, we're excited to solve the second by giving customers layers of observability critical for data-driven decision making and understanding core system performance.

Datadog is a monitoring and security platform for cloud applications, and a Fastly integration partner for data storage and analysis.

Datadog vice president Product - Community Ilan Rabinovitch says, "Serverless architecture has changed the game for operationalising and managing product workloads.

"As an integrated logging and data visualisation partner, we're thrilled to be part of this advanced serverless offering that will enable a new generation of low latency applications.

"Our partnership will provide Compute@Edge users real-time visibility and insight into infrastructure and performance from edge to origin.