Rookout, the debugging platform, which aims to help developers resolve bugs quicker and easier now provides a serverless debugging experience. With customers increasingly moving to serverless applications with huge pipelines, thousands of functions and billions of invocations, Rookout felt it was important to provide basic capabilities for serverless debugging.

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sat down with Liran Haimovitch, CTO and Co-Founder at Rookout, to discuss the company’s new serverless debugging experience. Haimovitch says, “After a while, we’ve understood that it’s important to take serverless as a whole spot of the debugging paradigm. It’s not just about being able to debug one instance of a function, especially as we are seeing more and more customers shifting from serverless, experimental, one-off functions for DevOps, or pipelining into major stuff.”

Whereas with the traditional infrastructure you have the servers and spin them up, perhaps when you are deploying and scaling, you have them for the long term. Serverless applications, on the other hand, can be difficult to debug because they are event-driven and reactive in nature, making it difficult to set up a development and staging environment as everything is happening on AWS.

With serverless, you may want to connect and see how many functions are running or how many servers you have, but this can change quite notably at any given moment. So it is a case of needing to see around a function, start and attach to it, collect the data you need and then detach. It is also not just about seeing what is running at that moment but also what was running previously and what versions are being used.

Rookout has previously announced a debugging experience for Kubernetes aimed to help developers make sense of where exactly they wanted to focus on and see what was going on. That initial experience, although it greatly improved the debugging experience for Kubernetes, was not optimized for serverless. The new serverless debugging experience aims to address this while forming part of Rookout’s overall cloud-native debugging experience as the company sees a growing segment of its customer base using serverless and asking for better support.

Guest: Liran Haimovitch (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: Rookout (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

About Liran Haimovitch: Liran is the Co-Founder and CTO of Rookout. He’s an advocate of modern software methodologies like agile, lean and devops. Liran’s passion is to understand how software actually works.

About Rookout: Rookout is a shift-left observability platform that empowers engineers to solve customer issues 5x faster, by reducing debugging and logging time by 80%. With its live data collection and debugging platform, Rookout allows software engineers to understand and debug any application in real time, no matter where it’s running.

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.