Serverless can save you money, but the tradeoff is that it is weird. Your CPU gets frozen between requests. Your code runs in a tiny, isolated sandbox with extremely limited resources. And every millisecond of initialization time costs money.

In this episode of Datadog Illuminated, AJ Stuyvenberg, Staff Engineer on Datadog’s Serverless team, explains how his team rewrote Datadog’s serverless agent from scratch, in a language none of them had ever used in production.

The rewrite cut the binary from 55 megabytes to 7 and dropped cold start time from around 400 milliseconds to 50-60.

Give it a watch! www.youtube.com/watch

Whitney, a woman with reddish-brown bangs, laughs with both hands on her cheeks on the left. AJ Stuyvenberg, a man with short brown hair and a beard wearing a maroon shirt, smiles on the right. Between them, a lightboard reads "WHY WE REWROTE OUR SERVERLESS AGENT" in large yellow and white pixel-style letters over chalk-style diagram notes about AWS Lambda, binary size reduction, and cold start improvements. "Datadog Illuminated" appears in neon-style lettering in the upper left corner. "with AJ STUYVENBERG" is written at the bottom right.