Case Study: How Honeycomb used Serverless to Speed Up Its Servers

At Honeycomb, customers send lots of data and then compose complex, ad hoc queries. Most are simple, some are not, and some are really not. The load is complex, spontaneous, and urgent, and it would have been prohibitively expensive to size a server cluster to handle big queries quickly. So Honeycomb took a different approach: farm the work out to AWS Lambda, Amazon's serverless offering. In this model, Lambda becomes an on-demand accelerator for Honeycomb’s always-on servers. The benefits are immense, improving response times by an order of magnitude. But the challenges are numerous and often unexpected.

Join us for this Case Study with Honeycomb developer advocate Jessica Kerr to learn how Honeycomb approached the problem of handling its clients’ queries with Lambda. You’ll learn the benefits and constraints of the serverless-as-accelerator model and get practical advice based on Honeycomb’s own hard-earned experience.

Recorded on April 26, 2022. See the original event page for resources for further learning or watch recordings of other past events.

O'Reilly Case Studies explore how organizations have overcome common challenges in business and technology through a series of one-hour interactive events. You’ll engage in a live conversation with experts, sharing your questions and challenges while hearing their unique perspectives, insights, and lessons learned.