Fastly, Inc., provider of a global edge cloud platform, today announced the extension of its platform's observability features to its Compute@Edge serverless compute environment. These advancements include customizable logging, real-time and historical metrics, and newly-launched tracing, giving developers newfound transparency into what happens after code is deployed within a serverless architecture and unlocking mission-critical visibility needed to find and fix operational issues fast. Fastly's Compute@Edge helps companies build applications and execute code on its globally distributed infrastructure, at the edge of the internet, without any of the maintenance or headache of managing it directly.

"At Fastly, we think observability should go beyond logging and monitoring to also provide the context and data needed to answer crucial questions about serverless performance and, ultimately, an end user's experience," said Tyler McMullen, CTO of Fastly. "In addition to concerns about cold start times, observability has been a top apprehension with serverless among developers. With Compute@Edge, we solved for the first concern with a 100x faster startup time than any other solution in the market. Now, we're excited to solve the second by giving customers layers of observability critical for data-driven decision making and understanding core system performance."

Compute@Edge accomplishes this level of observability by providing developers with:

• Customizable Logging: Developers can send real-time logs to 27 supported endpoints and counting. Developers have access to automatically-exposed default log fields, and can also capture custom event details that meet their business needs. Having access to log data helps developers determine the root cause of a host of potential issues, from infrastructure to end-user.
• Real-time and Historical Metrics: Compute@Edge surfaces rich metrics, such as CPU and RAM utilization, and lets developers explore that data as it happens, or in historical analysis. This increased visibility allows developers to better monitor application performance and react in real time to keep a site online, which can support revenue and a better end-user experience.
• End-to-End Request Visibility: Compute@Edge honors request tracing parameters by maintaining them when they enter and leave the Fastly platform. Developers can tag individual end-user requests with unique identifiers, helping illuminate any blind spots in multi-technology infrastructures and providing details on the request's lifetime. Users can pass this information along to third-party systems like Datadog that help with data visualization, and to conduct further, tailored analysis.

"Serverless architecture has changed the game for operationalizing and managing product workloads," said Ilan Rabinovitch, Vice President, Product & Community at Datadog, a monitoring and security platform for cloud applications, and a Fastly integration partner for data storage and analysis. "As an integrated logging and data visualization partner, we're thrilled to be part of this advanced serverless offering that will enable a new generation of low latency applications. Our partnership will provide Compute@Edge users real-time visibility and insight into infrastructure and performance from edge to origin."

Customers are testing use cases that range from content transformation at the edge, to identity enforcement, to enterprise-wide data loss prevention and data protection. RVU, the UK's leading resource for market comparison sites and apps such as Uswitch, Money, and Bankrate, is encouraged by the observability built into Compute@Edge's development experience. "Fastly's new Compute@Edge offering aligns with RVU's vision for the future and our team is excited to leverage the data and deeper insights into performance that it provides," said Tom Booth, Head of Infrastructure and Security at RVU. "In addition to the broad benefits of externalizing business logic to the edge, having more visibility and scalability are critical to our workflows and business processes, and from our experience so far, we see promise that these capabilities are finally attainable through serverless technology."

Developers and businesses interested in being part of the beta can sign up for details by visiting https://www.fastly.com/products/edge-compute/serverless.