Baselime was founded in October 2021.

But it all started a few years prior, in mid-2018 when Boris came across Amazon S3. This was his first encounter with serverless technologies and he instantly recognised this is the future. Fast forward a few months and in early 2019 he started playing around with AWS Lambda to build Twitter bots and other smaller projects.

It all started with a bot.

Whilst building these projects, he started feeling the pain of keeping an eye on how his systems were running. In distributed systems, the surface area for bugs to creep up is bigger. This is exacerbated in serverless architectures.

Bytes was born. Bytes is a programme that watches the logs from all Lambda functions in a system. When a log message looks suspicious, it sends an alert to a dedicated Slack channel. Boris built this to stay in the know when things went south in his systems. It was the first seed of what was coming for Baselime. At the time, it was good enough for a hobbyist building non-critical software.

Bytes alerts, still running to this day

In the meantime, Boris joined an early-stage startup where he had the flexibility to explore ways to improve the containerised monolithic architecture the company was running. AWS Lambda was the perfect candidate for the migration. He led the transition from Docker to Lambda in this organisation. But the questions remained: how do we know that everything is working as we expect it to? How do we know there aren't any emerging behaviours we are not aware of? How do we investigate incidents without impersonating Sherlock?

Rare image of an engineer excited to investigate a defect in a serverless architecture

With his team of engineers, they investigated commercial solutions and spent countless hours stitching together open-source technologies, but nothing worked. They were still in the dark.

In order to get his hands even dirtier with serverless technologies, Boris built a SaaS product over the next 9 months, with the restriction of using exclusively serverless services. This gave him even more insights into the pitfalls of understanding serverless architectures. Bytes was tremendously improved, to automatically provide structured logging, tracing, and storing the emitted events in an indexable database and cold storage. Yet investigating defects remained a pain.

After a short stint at another serverless first organisation and discussing with other engineering teams, it became clear this was a widespread problem: nobody knows what is going on in their highly distributed event-driven architectures.

In June 2021 Boris joined a startup pre-accelerator and started working on what would ultimately become Baselime in September 2021. He told the world just a few days later.