What is serverless? What do people want it to be? Serverless is when you write your software, deploy it to a Cloud vendor that will scale and run it, and you receive a pay-for-use bill. It\u2019s not necessarily a function of a service, but a concept.\nToday, we\u2019re talking to Nitzan Shapira, co-founder and CEO of Epsagon, which brings observability to serverless Cloud applications by using distributed tracing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. He is a software engineer with experience in software development, cyber security, reverse engineering, and machine learning.\nSome of the highlights of the show include:\n\nModern renaissance of \u201cfunctions as a service\u201d compared to past history; is as abstracted as it can be, which means almost no constraints\nIf you write your own software, ship it, and deploy it - it counts as serverless\nSome treat serverless as event-driven architecture where code swings into action\nWhen being strategic to make it more efficient, plan and develop an application with specific and complicated functioning\nEpsagon is a global observer for what the industry is doing and how it is implementing serverless as it evolves\nTrends and use cases include focusing on serverless first instead of the Cloud\nEconomic Argument: Less expensive than running things all the time and offers ability to trace capital flow; but be cautious about unpredictable cost \xa0\xa0\nUse bill to determine how much performance and flow time has been spent\nCompanies seem to be trying to support every vendor\u2019s serverless offering; when it comes to serverless, AWS Lambda appears to be used most often\nNot easy to move from one provider to another; on-premise misses the point\nPeople starting with AWS Lambda need familiarity with other services, which can be a reasonable but difficult barrier that\u2019s worth the effort\nManaging serverless applications may have to be done through a third party \nSystemic view of how applications work focuses on overall health of a system, not individual function\nEpsagon is headquartered in Israel, along with other emerging serverless startups; Israeli culture fuels innovation\n\nLinks:\n\nEpsagon\nEmail Nitzan Shapira\nNitzan Shapira on Twitter\nHeroku\nGoogle App Engine\nAWS Elastic Beanstalk\nLambda\nAmazon CloudWatch\nAWS X-Ray\nSimon Wardley\nCharity Majors\nStart-Up Nation\nDigital Ocean