Partnership ecosystems have become a hallmark of the information technology industry, with companies forming cooperative and mutually beneficial bonds with multiple vendors and customers.

One of the largest is the Amazon Web Services Inc. Partner Network, which has tens of thousands of members around the world. Amongst the many standout startups within that ecosystem is Lumigo Ltd., which provides monitoring and bugging for cloud and serverless applications. After benefitting from being part of AWS’ Global Startupp Program to scale its business, Lumigo is passing that supportive mindset down to make its customers’ lives easier.

“Lumigo allows you to see where do you spend your time? Where are the hiccups in your system? What’s running in parallel to what in the same transaction where you can optimize,” said Erez Berkner (pictured, left), co-founder and chief executive officer of Lumigo. “And that’s the essence of what Lumigo provides in a distributed environment and focusing on serverless.”

Berkner and Kevin O’Neill (pictured, right), chief technology officer at Lumigo partner Flexible Finance Inc., spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. They discussed the benefits of going serverless and how Lumigo helped Flex overcome the challenges of rapidly scaling to meet customer demand. (* Disclosure below.)

Payment smoothing company Flex aims for ‘zero ops’

When Flex took off, the small developer team for the cloud native startup was unprepared.

“When the business hit, it went from zero to 100 miles an hour so quickly,” O’Neill recalled.

Without the time (or the inclination) to worry about monitoring its serverless applications, they opted for “zero ops” and handed the responsibility to Lumigo, according to O’Neill.

“I wanted something that I could just drop in and it would just work,” O’Neill stated. “I wanted something that was giving me information consistently. … I wanted it to have coverage of the assistance that we use. We use Dynamo a lot; we use Lambdas a lot. I wanted not just cursory coverage … I wanted something that was dedicated to it that gave me information that was useful for me. And the specialist serverless providers were the obvious choice there.”

After researching different vendors, Flex opted for Lumigo.

“[It] was the one that worked best straight out of the box for me. It gave me the information I wanted. It gave me the experience I wanted. And to be frank, they reached out really quickly and had a chat about my specific problems,” O’Neill said.

Over time, the relationship has matured into a lasting partnership that benefits both companies.

Value-added benefits come from Lumigo’s tracing functionality

From Lumigo’s point of view, the challenges Flex was facing were common for companies opting to go serverless. The first is visibility. As environments grow more complex, companies lose the big picture of what is going on, and can’t see when something fails or is about to fail in production. They also need to be able to drill down to find the root cause of the problem and fix it simply, without the time-consuming and tedious process of having to dig through log records and connect the dots manually. Lumigo solves both of these issues through its serverless monitoring and troubleshooting platform, Berkner explained.

Eliminating logging is a big plus for O’Neill. He has always preferred a tracing approach to understanding what is going on within Flex’s systems.

“Logging is one of those things that you always don’t have the thing logged that you’re interested in. You put in whatever logging you like, but the thing you need will always be missing,” he said.

Tracing solutions such as Lumigo or OpenTracing log the information that’s moving through the system rather than selecting specific processes to log.

Expense can be a stumbling block when it comes to managed services such as Lumigo. But the benefits add up to savings that exceed the upfront costs, according to O’Neill. When looking at the bigger picture, the service costs are minor compared to the expenses it takes to watch, manage and trace a system, he added.

O’Neill compares the service to buying insurance: “It’s one of those things that doesn’t pay for itself until it pays for itself,” he said.

Adding to the value equation, O’Neill has incorporated Lumigo’s functionality into his day-to-day development process.

“One of the checks I go through when I’m debugging or when I’m looking at a problem, especially a distributed problem, is what went through Lumigo? What happened here, here and here, and why did that happen in response to this?” he said.

Lumigo solves EventBridge tracing issue in record time

Tracing issues are extremely complex for companies like Flex, which operates in a dispersed environment where information is spread across multiple systems operated by third-party vendors. As a financial services provider, it also deals with sensitive and confidential data.

To help maintain security, Flex is built as an event source system. This means it derives the state of the information from things that have occurred rather than a current snapshot of what something looks like, O’Neill explained. So instead of a customer being identified from information stored in a database as a record, they are identified from actions they have done, such as changing a phone number or changing an address. This enables Flex to do a lot of its security and encryption at these lower levels.

“For example, a Social Security Number is encrypted and never is available as plain text. You need the keys to be able to unlock that particular piece of information,” O’Neill stated.

The problem is that this generates a lot of movement of information, and if it can’t be traced, the company is in trouble. This happened early in the relationship between Lumigo and Flex, when Flex found they were unable to trace to Amazon EventBridge. As about 70% of the company’s transactions involve going through EventBridge, this was a challenge. But, Lumigo quickly came through.

“I mentioned this to Erez and company and said: ‘Hey guys, we really need to trace to EventBridge,’ and a little while later we were tracing through EventBridge, which was fantastic,” O’Neill said.

EventBridge was fairly new when Flex approached Lumigo with its request to be able to trace through the serverless event bus service. So, Lumigo in turn reached out to AWS for help.

“Due to the partnership that we have with AWS, we were able to get this supported relatively fast and be first to market supporting EventBridge,” Berkner said. “We always try to make sure there’s an open communication with all of our customers and  … we try to accommodate the different requests.” 

It all adds up to one major payoff, according to O’Neill: Hands-off simplicity.

“The nice part about Lumigo is I don’t have to do much in order for it to just do its thing,” he said. “This comes back to that philosophy of zero ops, zero effort. I don’t want to be concentrating on how I build my tracing infrastructure. I just want it to work.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. (* Disclosur: Lumigo Ltd. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Lumigo nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE