Top 16 Tools That Can Aid Your Serverless Needs

The three leading frameworks—  AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Functions have become the talk of the serverless town by offering abilities like faster development support and lower operational costs. 

Organizations are adopting serverless and so are B2B opportunists coming up with best of tools in the market with attractive platforms for serverless management. 

If you are an organization who is trying to go serverless and are facing challenges about what tool does what, here’s a list of top 16 tools according to their USPs.

Open Source Tools

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is the most opted for platform for managing serverless workloads by organizations. It operates on a finely grained model of rapid deployment that uses Istio to scale and support the advanced scenarios. Form automatic scaling to maintaining microservice application containers, the platform has earned a lot of popularity in recent times. 

Kubeless

A Kubernetes-native serverless framework is further designed that can be deployed on top of a Kubernetes cluster and gain an advantage of all the Kubernetes primitives. It deploys small bits of code or functions and clones AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions. 

OpenFass

Offering a UI portal and one-click install, the OpenFass has premium support for metrics. It runs on existing hardware or public/private cloud-like Kubernetes and writes functions in any technological language that enables you to consume events without repetitive boiler-plate coding. 

Fn Project

A container-native serverless platform, Fn Project possess the ability to run on any cloud or premise due to its extensible support for all kinds of programming languages. Being event-driven and written in Go, it becomes an easy to use tool for developers and operators. 

OpenWhisk

Written in Scala language, the Apache OpenWhisk is again an open source tool that manages the infrastructure and provisions for executing code in response to events at any scale. The serverless platform includes a REST API-based Command Line Interface (CLI) that supports popular container deployment options. 

Fission

A faster serverless framework that operates on just the code, Fission focuses on productivity and high performance of developers. It is built on Kubernetes and sanctions coders to map short-lived functions with any event triggers, such as HTTP requests. 

IronFunctions

As a cost-effective framework, IronFunctions makes efficient use of resources as developers write the functions in Go language. With a cohesive microservices platform, it gives access to a single system to code, monitor and manage. 

Tools for Every Phase of Serverless

In the process of integrating serverless, there can be various tasks for which specific tools can come to your aid. For the ease of understanding, we have divided them into phases of adopting a serverless framework. 

Start with Development

The ignition point of serverless is its development. This is where the infrastructure is built and a base is set for the functions to run.

SLAppForge

The platform introduces you to Sigma IDE (integrated development environment), a cloud computing tool for serverless applications that facilitates invaluable insights of your deployments with its in-built dashboard. The cloud-based hybrid IDE provides a fairly simple and intuitive environment with written code. It provisions for an application that builds, tests and deploys serverless faster. SLAppForge’s Sigma automatically produces an AWS CloudFormation configuration that allows for triggering the deployments directly from the UI. 

Stackery

Acting as a bridge between your resources in the cloud and your local IDE, the Stackery Canvas configures a deployable architecture for you. It allows you to develop Lambdas locally against live AWS services and manage the apps completely, from the pipeline to production. The platform gives you visibility across the teams by allowing CloudFormation to apply the stack configuration to the provider account.

Monitoring is the Key 

The next logical step in the adaptation is the monitoring of the serverless. Given that a lot of functions are new and invisible to the developers, it gets crucial for you to monitor the frameworks. Here are the tools for monitoring: 

Dashbird

Ranging a list of features from failure detection to visibility for AWS Lambda-based solutions, the platform offered by Dashbird is easy to set up as it requires no code changes. You can deploy a preconfigured CloudFormation template to your Lambdas. 

It enables support for functions like navigating, searching, and live-tailing for logs and integrates  Slack and email for alerting too. 

Epsagon

As a monitoring hub, Epsagon supports modern workload and makes it easy to troubleshoot issues with the searchable data point that fast-tracks the spotting of complex issues. 

The visualization of the tool automatically traces the production architecture and also provides auto-discovery of cloud resources and external APIs. 

IOPipe

For a deeper visibility of your development in serverless, IOPipe is an apt tool that runs in production at scale. It is for the newbies in the serverless town who are looking to eliminate the challenges that the transition brings in. Catering issues like databases, authentication, and payments, the tool takes a customer-centric approach by providing the right information at the right time. 

Thundra

With asynchronous monitoring, the platform of Thundra takes for a quick dig in the serverless data pipeline. It collates metrics, logs and traces all interactions between the resources from an observability point of view in a holistic manner. Unlike other monitoring tools, Thundra holds the capabilities of answering problems in minutes for any observability issues. 

Do not Forget Security

Security is another major sector of concern that manifolds with serverless. More the environments are contained and hidden, more is the security needs of each. Therefore, these products address the security needs of your serverless:

Protego

A 360 scan of your infrastructure is undertaken by Protego that helps in detecting threats as and when they initiate. Therefore, it mitigates security breach attacks in real-time and improves performance without hindrance. 

Promising unmatched security and control over end-to-end applications, the tool leverages the new opportunities provided by serverless to aid organizations in their endeavors. 

PureSec

Entrusted by many, PureSec is a serverless computing environment for your functions that intelligently provides unparalleled security. From detecting to blocking any threat containing actions, the tool works on a triggering protocol. It sanctions investigations in your architecture for any malicious functions that can help you in tightening the security. 

Special Mentions

CloudZero

A tool for engineers, architects, and DevOps teams for monitoring the serverless applications in a way that also helps you understand it in real-time, is termed as CloudZero. It was designed for various tasks like manage latency, errors, and costs across multiple accounts via a single platform. 

Honeycomb

Quite similar to CloudZero, the services of Honeycomb creates a simple log for analysis in a visual manner for millions of events in a fraction of the time. With equal visibility and minimal customer impact, the tools seem to be a  natural fit for stateless, serverless code snippets. 

You can manage around the release date and debug in real-time by tracking the exact spot of latencies using the tracing view that validates and assess severity and impact.

Wrapping Up

While serverless is rapidly spreading its wings, the technology market is also growing in parallel and maintaining an ecosystem. 

With these tools that come in handy, you can support your serverless architectures for all the database and resources related issues that are part and parcel of the environments. 

Share your views and add more tools that you think fit the bill in the comments below!