AWS Lambda and New Relic Serverless at re:Invent: Function Faster with Provisioned Concurrency

As partners, AWS and New Relic are focused on delivering fast-paced innovation in serverless computing. Today, we're announcing three new capabilities that enhance the experience of New Relic customers using AWS Lambda and with New Relic Serverless solutions: Provisioned Concurrency for AWS Lambda,  provisioned concurrency metrics for New Relic Serverless, and a new CLI installer for New Relic Serverless.

Introducing Provisioned Concurrency for AWS Lambda

For enterprise teams that deal with spikes in workloads or in user traffic throughout their applications, serverless computing is a natural fit in terms of cost, built-in autoscaling, and ease of deployment. Running code without needing to provision servers and paying only for the compute time consumed allows for massive scaling via AWS Lambda during important events like Cyber Monday, Super Bowl Sunday, Election Day, or when Beyonce’s latest album drops—without paying for or managing idle servers the rest of the year.

However, humans aren’t always predictable. Many organizations often deal with short bursts of sporadic traffic or with major, unpredictable events that flood their applications with concurrent requests. In many cases, the APIs serving these requests need predictable latency and can’t afford a significant percentage of traffic experiencing an adverse experience. In this case, the amount of time it takes to initialize a function (commonly known as a “cold start”) can impact customer experience in cases where milliseconds matter.

To solve for this, AWS  released Provisioned Concurrency. This new feature gives AWS customers greater control over the start time of their Lambda functions. When enabled, Provisioned Concurrency keeps functions initialized and hyper-ready to respond in double-digit milliseconds.

Here are some important things to know about Provisioned Concurrency from AWS:

• Provisioned Concurrency provides greater control over the startup time of your Lambda functions.
• Using Provisioned Concurrency won't require any changes to existing code. It works with all existing functions and runtimes.
• You fully control when and for how long you take advantage of Provisioned Concurrency. You can directly enable or disable concurrency on your functions by using the AWS Management Console, the Lambda API, the AWS CLI, AWS CloudFormation, or through Application Auto Scaling.
• Provisioned Concurrency adds a new pricing dimension that pays for keeping functions initialized. You only pay for the amount of concurrency that you configure and for the period of time that you configure it. When you enable Provisioned Concurrency for your function and you execute it, you also pay for requests and execution duration.

Monitoring provisioned concurrency metrics with New Relic Serverless

As an AWS Launch Partner at re:Invent, New Relic now provides provisioned concurrency metrics as part of our New Relic Serverless for AWS Lambda experience.

New Relic Serverless helps modern enterprises—such as Morningstar and Jabil—monitor, visualize, troubleshoot, and alert on their AWS Lambda functions in a single experience. Once a customer has enabled Provisioned Concurrency via AWS, New Relic Serverless will provide detailed metrics on functions using the new feature. Organizations using provisioned concurrency metrics can unlock a number of useful capabilities, including:

• New serverless performance and efficiency insights, such as amount utilized over time by your AWS Lambda functions
• The ability to drill down into high-cardinality invocation data to troubleshoot performance issues
• End-to-end visibility of components impacting function execution, through New Relic distributed tracing

To get started monitoring your provisioned concurrency metrics on AWS Lambda, sign up for a free trial or visit your existing New Relic Insights dashboard and run the following query:

SELECT * FROM ServerlessSample where provider.provisionedConcurrentExecutions.Sum is not null and awsRegion = 'sa-east-1' SINCE 1574605540000 UNTIL 1574805540000

Stay tuned for additional updates on provisioned concurrency metrics with New Relic.

New Relic’s CLI installer: accelerating time to serverless observability

Instrumenting observability into your serverless applications just got easier with New Relic’s new command-line interface (CLI) installer.

Available for Node.js and Python runtimes, developers and operations teams can now install and configure the New Relic AWS Lambda Layer directly from the CLI. The CLI installer automatically selects the correct New Relic layer for your function’s runtime and region, wraps your AWS Lambda functions without a code change, and lets you upgrade with a single command.

Join us on ‘The Quest for Observability’ at re:Invent

Level up your serverless observability at this year’s AWS re:Invent with “The Quest for Observability” from New Relic Serverless. We’re offering demos on all of our magical new features, “Deploy Glambda” nail polish, and a bunch of other serverless goodies and gatherings for the serverless community. Visit us at booth #2433 to begin your own quest!

Lastly, we’re proud to sponsor the Serverless for Everyone Community Party on Wednesday, Dec. 4 at 7:30 p.m. Serverless isn't about the tech. It's about the people—and this is a great chance to connect in a casual setting with the people building the next wave of serverless applications. Stop by our booth at re:Invent to learn more.