Thundra Re:cap 2018
By: Emrah Şamdan
Tags: Observability, AWS Lambda, Serverless, Debugging, Monitoring

2018 was the year of Serverless. It is not just the new hot trend that only technology geeks are talking about. In terms of general adoption and popularity, even enterprise organizations are starting to seriously look into and implement serverless platforms as a standard approach to building applications.

Check out the chart on the left hand side to see how Google searches for “serverless” jumped in 2018. Serverless reached sufficient maturity in 2018 to enable people to migrate their existing systems to serverless or start new projects using serverless architectures. Expect to see even a bigger jump in adoption in 2019.

2018 was a big year for Thundra as well. We started off the year as a small intrapreneurship project within OpsGenie . Perhaps our biggest news all year was that in October 2018, Thundra officially spun off and became an independent company — Thundra, Inc. This has allowed us to truly focus on Thundra’s development and Thundra go-to-market efforts without any distraction.

Now, as we start off 2019, we have 13 invaluable team members and are actively hiring to expand the team. Thundra now supports way more than just Java. We also support Node.js, Python, and Golang for AWS Lambda. Let’s take a look through what made 2018 unforgettable for Thundra.

Thundra grows up: From Private Beta to Public Beta to General Availability

Let’s take a closer look at the product updates we made last year.

January 2018: Private Beta Release

In January, we started off the year offering a private beta with a platform that which could only monitor Java AWS Lambda functions at the beginning of this year. We had a great reception from users! But, we quickly understood that we needed more than just support for Java in order to make Thundra more broadly useful.

March 2018: Public Beta Release

On March 23rd, Thundra moved from private to public beta, which included basic support for Node.js, Python, and Go in additional to our already-existing Java support. We received great feedback from our community, which we used to plan our roadmap for the rest of the year, improve our libraries, and add new capabilities to Thundra.

October 2018: General Availability and Company Launch

On October 23rd, Thundra officially released its fully supported, General Availability product. Our launch announced advanced and deep support for Node.js applications and expanded support for Python applications, including automated instrumentation capabilities for both languages. We also added OpenTracing compatibility!

November 2018: Lambda Layer support and a call-out at the AWS re:Invent keynote!

As you can imagine for a company focused on supporting AWS Lambda users, AWS re:Invent was a hugely important event for us. We announced our support for the new Lamba Layers and Runtime API, which was highlighted in the Thursday keynote.

Just as exciting (for Thundra), Thundra was called out as a Lambda Layers launch partner! Mike Melason of the New Stack even wrote an article covering the news.

Support for Lambda Layers is a really important, time-saving, new feature for anyone building Lambda applications. When combined with our automated wrapping and instrumentation capabilities, adding monitoring becomes extremely low-effort. For example, all you need to do is add the Thundra Layer to your Lambda function to quickly see that, for example, your queries to a DynamoDB table cause your functions to run longer than they should.

With all these improvements (and more), you can now automatically trace Lambda functions with no code change and start solving errors, inefficiencies, slow-downs in just a couple of minutes. We also added many more capabilities to our agents that I haven’t mentioned here. I recommend checking out our documentation for Java, Node.js, Python and Go to learn more.

Analyze your serverless applications somewhere else with Thundra’s integrations

This year we also put great importance in building integrations with popular tools, allowing users to visualize and query the data we produce in the platform of their choice.

Splunk Integration

We understood that this option is especially important for our enterprise customers who frequently ask for on-premises solutions. Splunk was a great choice for integration partner because it’s so popular with enterprise organizations for visualization and alerting. With Thundra’s integration, customers don’t need to pass their data throughout our system. It goes directly from their AWS accounts into their Splunk instances to be analyzed alongside all their other enterprise data.

We released our Splunk integration at the end of July as the first organization to bring full serverless observability into Splunk. You can fill out the form here to start analyzing your own AWS Lambda data inside your own Splunk instance.

Honeycomb Integration

We released our second integration in November! This time, we choose to partner with Honeycomb. Similar to the Splunk integration, the serverless monitoring data that Thundra gathers flows into your Honeycomb account without passing through Thundra’s servers. Our integration with Honeycomb is special because Honeycomb is unsurpassed at complex tracing visualizations and querying, enabling users to dive deeply into metrics and performance data. When combined with Thundra’s rich AWS Lambda datasets, our users can quickly answer very complex questions they cannot answer using other tools, including Thundra’s own!. If you haven’t yet watched it, I recommend you check out the webinar that we recently hosted with Christine Yen, CPO at Honeycomb. Then, try it yourself with a free integration trial! Get your trial by filling out our sign-up form here.

Thundra, partnered up!

This year, we established partnerships that we are very proud of. Of course, we are partners with Splunk (Technology Alliance Partner) and Honeycomb. In addition to those partnerships, Thundra achieved APN Advanced Technology Partner status by AWS, which we announced along with Lambda Layers support at AWS re:Invent. By passing AWS’s rigorous technical and architectural review process, we can now provide additional confidence to AWS Lambda users that Thundra both understands their serverless monitoring needs *and* has built a solid architectural and technical solution on top of AWS to reliably and securely support them — in development and in production.

Events galore!

2018 was the year where we made our first public appearances. In October, we sponsored Splunk .conf in Orlando, FL. We showed off the capabilities of our Splunk integration and Splunk App, which is available for free on Splunkbase. We received very positive feedback about our capabilities for monitoring serverless applications, on the depth of our Java support, and the fact that it was actually available as a completely on-premise solution.

Obviously, AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas was a remarkable experience for us. We had a constant stream of traffic to the booth, earned our moment on the keynote stages as launch partners for AWS Lambda Layers, and had numerous visitors who were impressed at what they could learn from their AWS Lambda environment beyond what they normally got with Cloudwatch logs.

We attended other events as well! Serkan, our CTO, presented at Oracle One to discuss Thundra’s capabilities and how it can be used to gather monitoring data from Oracle Fn. Doğuşcan, our technical marketing engineer, spoke at Serverless Computing London and shared our internal ideas for anomaly detection in serverless applications.

A curated 2018 list: The best of Thundra and some others as well.

Knowledge is meaningful only if it is shared with someone else. We do this with regular contributions to our blog. You can browse the entire blog all by yourself, or you can check out the top 3 blogs that acquired the most views in 2018:

If you want to read something from the serverless community but not from us, I recommend the following:

What’s next? Onto 2019!

And here we are now — leaving 2018 behind. I am not going to give anything away but rest assured we have plenty of exciting plans for 2019. . Thundra will continue to grow in capability and functionality. We are hiring NOW to add to the team. Look for us at AWS and serverless events! Sign up for our newsletter to stay in touch with us. Play with our demo environment, get your free account, and don’t hesitate to contact us with your requests. I wish you all a very serverless 2019!