Serverless is a dream. To be truly “serverless” there must be a perfect boundary between all the technical concerns that matter to your business and all the arbitrary, fiddly, un-fun platform hosting worries that you can leave to a vendor to handle.

The actual real-world products that are labeled “serverless” only approach this dream, and still leave you manually controlling details that in a perfect world would be automatic, handled by a vendor, and work perfectly for every user.

The problems that users face with serverless are often inherent to the design: issues with security configuration, cold starts, and observability. They’re the same problems you’d expect to have when most but not all details of running code are left to the vendor.

Anyway, it can be really hard to understand what's going on inside serverless stacks. AWS X-ray is an attempt to see how your requests travel through your stack, and New Relic Serverless has its own set of tools to give you insight.

Starting today, New Relic imports your X-ray data, and that's probably pretty useful.

cover image description: Three Parisian women watching the solar eclipse of 8 April 1921 on the Cour du Havre, published by Agence Rol