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Serverless

New Frankfurt location: deploy high-performance apps in Europe

Today, we are super excited to announce the grand opening of our Frankfurt core location in Germany! 🇩🇪🇪🇺 All users can now deploy their applications in the heart of Europe with one click, or API call, and enjoy all of the platform's features with the same pricing. Give it a try, sign up and deploy your full-stack apps now! As usual, we will seamlessly deploy your services across a fleet of high-performance MicroVMs running on top of BareMetal servers.

What is continuous deployment?

After working on a new feature or an improvement, it's normal that you want to deliver these changes to your users as fast as possible. Depending on your deployment pipeline, confidently deploying changes to production might include coordinating with whoever is leading on-call, getting their approval, manually deploying your changes, spending hours to monitor how it goes, and performing a rollback in case something goes wrong.

AWS Lambdas with TypeScript: Improve the Dev Experience

In part one of this series, we successfully built a TypeScript Lambda on the AWS cloud. But we left a lot of room for improvement in terms of the developer experience. For starters, the Lambda didn’t run on a local machine, which is cumbersome. The code we wrote is also not testable, which makes refactoring hard or, at least, dangerous. In this take, let’s focus on improving the developer experience. The goal is to make the code more robust and easier to work with. Ready?

What is a service mesh?

A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that manages traffic, also known as communication, between services in applications composed of containerized microservices. It is a critical component in a microservices architecture, responsible for the secure, fast, and reliable communication between services. This article answers a lot of the questions you may have about service meshes: What are they and how do they work? Who is using them and why?

Visualize Azure serverless workflow progress in realtime with pubsub

A suitable way to update a front-end from back-end processes is to use pubsub over WebSockets. In this video I'll show how to use Ably, a cloud based pubsub service, to visualize the progress of a serverless workflow implemented with Azure Functions and Durable Functions. About Ably Ably is an enterprise-grade pub/sub messaging platform. We make it easy to efficiently design, quickly ship, and seamlessly scale critical realtime functionality delivered directly to end-users. Every day, we deliver billions of realtime messages to millions of users for thousands of companies.

Distributed tracing with Envoy, Kuma, Grafana Agent, and Jaeger

As a cloud service provider, observability is a critical subject as it's strongly related to the availability of the services running on the platform. We need to understand everything that is happening on our platform to troubleshoot errors as fast as possible and improve performance issues. A year ago, while the platform was still in private beta, we faced a tough reliability issue: users were facing random 500 errors when accessing their applications.

How to build a serverless WebSockets platform

When building modern web applications, it is increasingly important to be able to handle realtime data with an event-driven architecture to propagate messages to all connected clients instantly. Several protocols are available, but WebSocket is arguably the most widely used as it is optimized for minimum overhead and low latency. The WebSocket protocol supports bidirectional, full-duplex communication between client and server over a persistent, single-socket connection.

Heroku's free tier legacy: The shoulders we stand on 15 years later

On August 15, 2022, we learned the shocking news that free Heroku Dynos, Heroku Postgres and Heroku Data for Redis will no longer be available and existing services will either need to upgrade to a paid service or find another hosting solution by November 28, 2022. Since its conception, Heroku has changed the way developers, hobbyists, students, and indie hackers deploy applications.