There may be nothing more terrifying in the enterprise computing world than being unable to look inside a system and see what’s happening. Blind faith is a bad idea and a sure ticket to disaster.

In the serverless computing world, apps are hard to debug because they are constructed by deploying functions to cloud providers with code that connects to third-party services. Because it’s serverless, there is no infrastructure to manage below functions, so in the absence of instrumentation, it can be difficult to see how apps are performing. Honeycomb.io is designed to solve this problem by building observability in the serverless world.

“It’s really getting to a point where you can develop an understanding of what your services and what your code do in real life under real load with real users,” said Aneel Lakhani (pictured), vice president of marketing at Honeycomb.io (from Hound Technology Inc.).

Lakhani visited the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host Stu Miniman (@stu) during the ServerlessConf in New York City. They discussed Honeycomb’s technology, opportunities presented to developers by the serverless model, and Amazon’s favorable position in the market.

Managing complex software

The big opportunity presented by serverless computing is in changing the way that developers have to manage complex software, along with how applications are delivered. There are still servers involved, but advantages include the ability to easily scale up or down in cloud resources, no infrastructure to administer and a pay-as-you go model.

Google, Microsoft and IBM now offer serverless platforms. But the concept was actually pioneered by Amazon when it rolled out Lambda three years ago. Many in the industry believe that this has given Amazon Web Services Inc. a distinct advantage.

“We have some significant users of Honeycomb who are 100 percent run on Amazon Lambda,” Lakhani said. “Effectively, this is a way for Amazon to eat most of the tech ecosystem, assuming people become dependent on them.”

What started as a quiet, even quirky piece of cloud-based functionality offered by Amazon is now becoming a much bigger deal. A company executive stated earlier this year that Amazon was seeing a growing number of enterprise companies using Lambda. And last month the news came out that Lambda would soon have the capability for aliases to shift traffic between two different function versions.

“What we hear from users who are using Lambda and using serverless functions is that the ability for them to get visibility into how a function performs is basically the highest priority outside of writing the function itself,” Lakhani concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the ServerlessConf event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE