Israeli startup Rookout Inc. is hoping to fill a niche in the market for debugging software, providing application code monitoring tools for Amazon Web Services’ serverless computing platform Amazon Lambda.

Growing in popularity among software developers, serverless computing  allows them to run their software in the cloud without worrying about creating or maintaining infrastructure such as virtual machines or software containers. Serverless infrastructure provides other advantages besides simply being easy to use, including scalability and affordability, which is why usage of these platforms is growing at a 700 percent annual clip, Rookout noted.

However, serverless computing isn’t always plain sailing, and when things go wrong with applications running on this infrastructure, it can be difficult to pinpoint the cause, Rookout said. The problem is that each function within AWS Lambda runs on its own cloud-based instance, and this makes it tricky to monitor things. The only way to debug serverless apps is to create a test environment that simulates the various third-party application programming interfaces and devices an app is communicating with, which is not only painstaking but also involves lots of guesswork.

“By its nature, serverless is production-first. An instance of serverless function might start up, run, do its job and vanish all in just a few milliseconds,” Liran Haimovitch, Rookout’s cofounder and chief technology officer, told SiliconANGLE. “There aren’t any good development environments for serverless.”

So Rookout’s aim is to make life much easier for developers. Its software works on serverless code as it runs on Lambda in production, allowing developers to pinpoint problems with just a single click. Developers simply identify the piece of code they wish to check for problems, and Rookout will provide a full stack trace that displays any issues via a friendly user interface. The tool works on live code, without stopping or changing anything in the environment, Rookout said.

The company claimed it provides an “unprecedented level” of visibility into serverless code and how it’s behaving.

“The sheer speed of serverless development means that complex bugs occur in production,” Haimovitch said in a statement. “Bugs happen, and they cost a lot of money. Now with Rookout, serverless doesn’t have to be a black box; developers can see inside Lambda and find out exactly what’s really happening in production, letting them take full advantage of the new serverless infrastructures.”

Image: Rookout