Even more so, debugging them in a live environment is not easy and it can be quite costly. Having the ability to locally simulate these components is not always an option. The components of serverless applications are highly distributed. Here are a few examples of these common challenges: Challenges of Modern Distributed Architecture This can lead to many challenges that are common to any developer that attempts this. It is made up of multiple components in which a developer might have to debug any or all of these components when an issue arises. Serverless Debug Mode: The ChallengesĪ serverless application is complex. On top of that, the loose dependency between all these components makes it harder to understand when interface contracts or compatibility is broken, making the developer’s life even more difficult while debugging. Serverless applications are complex and have many components, which introduces many opportunities and variables for things to go awry. So what can go wrong? Plenty of things, as it turns out.

It isn’t possible to set up all of the components in a local environment in order to debug and there is no option for debugging in a remote environment due to the nature of a serverless application. Due to this complexity, they have more failure points. Serverless flows have more components, and are therefore more complex. This is because it allows the developers to understand real application behavior. When debugging a serverless application, the most common method is logging.

So What’s Different? The Path to Debugging a Serverless AppĪs serverless has paved the way for new technology, it has also changed the process of debugging. Debugging monoliths is a bit simpler because all tasks run on a single process. Both of these can be set up in a local environment. In monoliths, most issues must be debugged locally as there are only two failure points: database behavior or UI/backend. After the breakpoint is set, the app will then be run in debug mode. So how does one begin? First start by choosing the preferred IDE, where a breakpoint will be set at the line of code you want to inspect. There is no need for this though, as monoliths are simpler to debug. Many developers would acknowledge that debugging is not their favorite part of the job, and when combining debugging with monolith applications, it gives them a moment of pause. This difficulty has led to many challenges when using Serverless Applications. Due to the complexity of its architecture, Serverless Applications are much more difficult to debug. Yet, as most developers know, when it truly comes down to the nitty gritty of debugging, monoliths win the debugging game with the ease of debugging that they allow. The hype around serverless applications and microservices grows every day, and that growth engenders the negativity around the term “monolith”. In short, an AWS serverless application is made up of multiple components, and the AWS Lambda function is what essentially connects these components and holds them together. There are a multitude of serverless computing options, but for the sake of this article we will focus on AWS serverless applications. The introduction of Serverless allowed developers to build and ship much faster, which in turn allows them to concentrate on coding rather than maintenance, auto scaling, and server provisioning, to name a few. With the introduction of serverless computing, the way enterprises are designed and how they build their production applications was changed. Technology has advanced rapidly, but the ease of debugging has not. The ServerlessDebugger VS Code plugin will automatically connect to the function secured with the debugger auth token you specify, and you’ll be able to troubleshoot your functions live from within VS Code as they execute on the AWS Lambda infrastructure.Ever feel like the world is moving by so rapidly, that it feels like something got left behind in the rush? That’s how we feel about being able to debug your applications easily. You can use the following launch configuration as a base for building your own:,At this point, you have all of the tools you need to debug your production Python functions in a local development environment. Below is a step-by-step guide for enabling live debugging of your AWS Lambda functions with ServerlessDebugger.,First, we need to add a launch configuration to VS Code so that we can attach the debugger to the simulated AWS runtime environment in which our functions will run. When you run this command, the AWS SAM CLI sets up the environment and waits for the VS Code debugger to be attached.,Luckily, ServerlessDebugger offers live debugging, a feature that lets you debug your functions in the AWS production environment.

Visual studio code debug serverless