Hi I am using the serverless framework to develop my application and I need to set it up in a local environment I am using API gateway, Lambda, VPC , SNS, SQS, and DB is connected via VPC peering, currently, everytime I am deploying and testing my code and its tedious process and takes 5 mins to deploy, Is there any way to set up a local environment to have everything in one place
It should be possible in theory, but it is not an easy thing to do. There are products like LocalStack that offer exactly this.
But, I would not recommend going that route. Ultimately, by design this will always be a huge cat and mouse game. AWS introduces a new feature or changes some minor detail of their implementation and products like LocalStack need to catch up. Furthermore, you will always only get an "approximation" of the "actual cloud". It never won't be a 100% match.
I would think there is a lot of work involved to get products like LocalStack working properly with your setup and have it running well.
Therefore, I would propose to invest the same time into proper developer experience within the "actual cloud". That is what we do: every developer deploys their version of the project to AWS.
This is also not trivial, but the end result is not a "fake version" of the cloud that might or might not reflect the "real cloud".
The key to achieve this is Infrastructure as code and as much automation as possible. We use Terraform and Makefiles which works very well for us. If done properly, we only ever build and deploy what we changed. The result is that changes can be deployed in seconds to AWS and the developer can test the result either through the Makefile itself or using the AWS console.
And another upside of this is, that in theory you need to do all the same work anyway for your continuous deployment, so ultimately you are reducing work by not having to maintain local deployments and cloud deployments.
Related
I am looking for a language / framework or a method by which I can build API / web application code such that it can run on Serverless compute's like aws lambda and the same code runs on a dedicated compute system like lightsail or EC2.
First I thought of using Docker to do this but AWS Lambda entry point is a specific function signature which is very different than Spring Controllers. Is there a solution available currently?
So basically when I run it in lambda - it will have cold start issue, later when the app is ready or get popular I would like to move it to a EC2 instance for better performance and higher traffic load.
I want to start right in this situation so that later it can be easy to port and resolve the performance issue's
I'd say; no this is not possible easily.
When you are building an api that you'd want to run on lambda's you most likely will be using an API Gateway which takes care of your routing to different lambda functions (best practice). So the moment you would me working on an api like this migrating to EC2 would be a nightmare as you would need to rebuild the whole application a more of a monolith application which could run on EC2.
I would honestly commit to either run it on EC2/Containers or run it on Lambda, if cold start is your main issue with Lambda's you might wanna look into Lambda Snapstart for Java or use another language like Typescript/Python.
After some correct keywords in google I finally got what I was looking for, checkout this blog and code library shared by AWS which helps you convert the request and response of the request as per the framework required http request
Running APIs Written in Java on AWS Lambda: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/java-apis-aws-lambda/
Repo Code: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-java-container
Thanks Ricardo for your response - will do check out Lambda Snapstart for sure and try it as well. I have not tested out this completely but it looks promising to some extent.
The problem
I'm approaching AWS, and the first test project will be a website, but i'm struggling on how to approach the resource and the tools to accomplish this.
AWS documentation is not really beginner-friendly, so to me it is like to being punched in the face at the first boxe training session.
First attempt
I've installed bot AWS and SAM cli tools, so what I would expect is to be able to create an empty stack at first and adding the resource one by one as the specifications are given/outlined, but instead what I see is that i need to give a template to the tool to create the new stack, but that means I need to know how to write it beforehand and therefore the template specifications for each resource type.
Second attempt
This lead me to create the stack and the related resources from the online console to get the final stack template, but then I need to test every new resource or any updated resource locally, so I have to copy the template from the online console to my machine and run the cli tools with this, but obviously it is not the desired development flow.
What I expected
Coming from a standard/classical web development I would expect to be able to create the project locally, test the related resources locally, version it, and delegate the deployment to the pipeline.
So what?
All this made me understand that "probably" I'm missing somenthing on how to use the aws cli tools and how the development for an aws-hosted application is meant to be done.
I'm not seeking for a guide on specific resource types like every single tutorial I've found online, but something on a higher level on how to handle a project development on aws, best practices and stuffs like that, I can then dig deeper on any resource later when needed.
AWS's Cloud Development Kit ticks the boxes on your specific criteria.
Caveat: the CDK has a learning curve in line with its power and flexibility. There are much easier ways to deploy a web app on AWS, like the higher-level AWS Amplify framework, with abstractions tailored to front-end devs who want to minimise the mental energy spent on the underlying infrastructure.
Each of the squillion AWS and 3rd Party deploy tools is great for somebody. Nevertheless, looking at your explicit requirements in "What I expected", we can get close to the CDK as an objective answer:
Coming from a standard/classical web development
So you know JS/Python. With the CDK, you code infrastructure as functions and classes, rather than 500 lines of YAML as with SAM. The CDK's reference implementation is in Typescript. JS/Python are also supported. There are step-by-step AWS online workshops for these and the other supported languages.
create the project locally
Most of your work will be done locally in your language of choice, with a cdk deploy CLI command to
bundle the deployment artefacts and send them up to the cloud.
test the related resources locally
The CDK has built-in testing and assertion support.
version it
"Deterministic deploy" is a CDK design goal. Commit your code and the generated deployment artefacts so you have change control over your infrastructure.
delegate the deployment to the pipeline
The CDK has good pipeline support: i.e. a push to the remote main branch can kick off a deploy.
AWS SAM is actually a good option if you are just trying to get your feet wet with AWS. SAM is an open-source wrapper around the aws-cli, which allows you to create aws resources like Lambda in say ~10 lines of code vs ~100 lines if you were to use the aws-cli directly. Yes, you'll need to learn SAM specific things like SAMtemplate and SAM-cli but it is pretty straightforward using this doc.
Once you get the hang of it, it would be easier to start looking under the hood of what/how SAM is doing things and get into the weeds with aws-cli if you wanted. Which will then allow you to build out custom solutions (using aws-cli) for your complex use cases that SAM may not support. Caveat: SAM is still pretty new and has open issues that could be a blocker for advanced features/complex use cases.
Long time stack overflow lurker and fist time poster.
I've started a new project using AWS lambdas and have found the learning curve particularly steep coming from a background of developing desktop applications.
When developing desktop applications it's easy to create a test environment locally. I know it's possible to test lambda functions locally and I've been able to do this for simple cases.
The lambda functions I'm using interact a lot with other AWS services (S3, Aurora, etc). Also, the final solution will include around 15 lambda functions linked via a step function.
I want to know if it's possible to create a separate test environment to the live production environment for the entire step function. This would allow me to perform system tests before deploying to production.
I've looked into AWS codepipeline as a possible solution but I'm not sure if this would allow me to create a seperate test environment before deploying to production.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
I'm presently looking into GCP's Deployment Manager to deploy new projects, VMs and Cloud Storage buckets.
We need a web front end that authenticated users can connect to in order to deploy the required infrastructure, though I'm not sure what Dev Ops tools are recommended to work with this system. We have an instance of Jenkins and Octopus Deploy, though I see on Google's Configuration Management page (https://cloud.google.com/solutions/configuration-management) they suggest other tools like Ansible, Chef, Puppet and Saltstack.
I'm supposing that through one of these I can update something simple like a name variable in the config.yaml file and deploy a project.
Could I also ensure a chosen name for a project, VM or Cloud Storage bucket fits with a specific naming convention with one of these systems?
Which system do others use and why?
I use Deployment Manager, as all 3rd party tools are reliant upon the presence of GCP APIs, as well as trusting that those APIs are in line with the actual functionality of the underlying GCP tech.
GCP is decidedly behind the curve on API development, which means that even if you wanted to use TF or whatever, at some point you're going to be stuck inside the SDK, anyway. So that's why I went with Deployment Manager, as much as I wanted to have my whole infra/app deployment use other tools that I was more comfortable with.
To specifically answer your question about validating naming schema, what you would probably want to do is write a wrapper script that uses the gcloud deployment-manager subcommand. Do your validation in the wrapper script, then run the gcloud deployment-manager stuff.
Word of warning about Deployment Manager: it makes troubleshooting very difficult. Very often it will obscure the error that can help you actually establish the root cause of a problem. I can't tell you how many times somebody in my office has shouted "UGGH! Shut UP with your Error 400!" I hope that Google takes note from my pointed survey feedback and refactors DM to pass the original error through.
Anyway, hope this helps. GCP has come a long way, but they've still got work to do.
I'm redoing a badly built web application that my company uses in python/django (after deciding it was the best tool for the job).
I don't have much time to spend on development, which means I have even less time to get it deployed, and since its resource intensive and will be used by a lot of people concurrently, I'd like to be able to take advantage of all the tools that AWS offers, such as RDS, ElastiCache, CloudWatch, and especially any auto scaling tools.
I've seen Heroku and liked it, but I would prefer to use AWS, and the price seems quite high.
I don't mind getting my hands dirty as long as it doesn't take half the development time setting up deployment.
I'm looking for something we can use, whether it be a service or AMI so that we can deploy automatically from our repository, without spending days configuring it and figuring out how to get it working, and without drastically increasing the price to host our app.
As you want something quick and simple, maybe consider RightScale's ServerTemplates to get you up and running quickly. RightScale have a free developer account. There are a few Django ServerTemplates and they are all priced for "All Users", so they'll work with the free developer account.
That will get you a base application stack quickly.
Next, I'd look into using fabric (similar to capistrano) and/or github post-commit hooks to automate deployment of your application.
Once you're happy with that and have more time on your hands you could look at adding all the other stuff you want to use (ElastiCache, etc).
Heroku runs on AWS: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/external-services
So, you can use AWS services from Heroku as any EC2 instance. If really wanting it, set Heroku for hard-to-setup services and some little AWS EC2 instance for I-do-myself services.
To automate the deployment you can use a 3rd party tool like capistrano or http://nudow.com. Capistrano will do a lot of the deployment but you have to host it yourself and you have to do the deployment in a specific way for it to work correctly (such as using the same keys everywhere, etc). Nudow.com is easier to setup and is hosted. It will deploy to your existing infrastructure and will do stuff like versioning. Also it has a lot of tools to do things like minimizing javascript/css and uploading to cloudfront.