Lambda functions are awesome, but they only provide a single dimension to allocate resources – memorySize. The simplicity is refreshing, as lambda functions are complex enough — but AWS really shouldn’t have called it memorySize if it controls CPU as well. Then again this is the company that gave us Systems Manager Session Manager, so the naming could have been worse (much worse...
At the end of 2018, AWS introduced custom runtimes for Lambda functions, which provided customers a way to run applications written in languages not in the holy list of the ‘Official AWS Lambda Runtimes’ which include a plethora of languages. It has 3 versions of Python, 2 versions of Node, Ruby, Java, Go and .NET core (that’s a lot of language support) Security-wise, it’s...
One of a great things about Lambda functions is that you can’t SSH into it. This sounds like a drawback, but actually it’s a great security benefit — you can’t hack what you can’t access. Although it’s rare to see SSH used as an entry path for attackers these days, it’s not uncommon to see organizations lose SSH keys every once in a while. So cutting down...
This is a continuation in the Klayers series, where I deep dive into the architecture of Klayers. At its core, Klayers is a collection of AWS Lambda Layers for Python3, with the idea that python packages in layers is more efficient than packaging them with application code. Visit the GitHub repo here, where you’d find 50+ lambda layers for public consumption across most AWS regions...
I’ve been bitten by the serverless bug lately, and just completed my latest hobby project this week. It’s a fully serverless pipeline that builds python packages as Lambda layers — and it uses Lambda functions to do so. As a quick side-note, before we dive into this intro, Lambda layers are simply zip files that get extracted into the /opt directory of your lambda...
Recently I found myself working with an S3 bucket of 13,000 csv files that I needed to query. Initially, I was excited, because now had an excuse to play with AWS Athena or S3 Select — two serverless tools I been meaning to dive into. But that excitement — was short-lived! For some (as yet unexplained) reason, AWS Athena is not available in us-west-1. Which seemingly, is the only...
Image from wikicommons. The Serverless framework (SF) is a fantastic tool for testing and deploying lambda functions, but it’s reliance on cloudformation makes it clumsy for infrastructure like DynamoDB, S3 or SQS queues. For example, if your serverless.yml file had 5 lambdas, you’d be able to sls deploy all day long. But add just one S3 bucket, and you’d first have to sls...
First a definition. A lambda function is a service provided by aws that runs code for you without the introducing the complexity of provisioning servers of managing Operating Systems. It belongs in a category of architectures called serverless architectures. There’s a whole slew of folks trying to define with is serverless, but my favorite definition is this. Serverless means No Server...
I’m still deep in my lambda love affair. Here’s my talk at the AWS meetup in SG on Lambda layers :