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!
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.
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.
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.
I have an existing spring boot, not a webservice but a Kafka client app. But the issue is we have been structured with typical Processor->Service->DAO layer. The jar is above 50 MB so anyway its not a candidate for aws lambda. I got some doubts, can I deploy the full jar OR should I use the step functions?. All tutorials are a single class function. Do anyone have tried out this(multiclass jar)? Also now lambda have introduced dockers. Thats adding a more confusion, can I deploy a docker, but looks like its the same under the hood.
My pick is ECS/EKS with Fargate. Basically am planning to get rid of the docker image as well. But looks like there is no way available in lambda to host my existing app other than refactoring it as step function. Is it correct?
You can deploy the full fat jar with the usual multi-class hierarchy, but it is not recommended due to the Cold Start issue unless you use "Provisioned concurrency".
Here are my tips for you:
Keep the multi-class hierarchy, which anyways doesn't have much impact on the Jar size. This will keep your code testable. Try to remove the Spring if it is possible and create your own small dependency injection framework or use other small frameworks for that purpose.
Review all your dependencies, remove jars that are not needed. Our usual code is always very small, the dependent jar makes our deployable huge.
I have a serverless framework service with (say)five aws lambda functions using python. By using github I have created a CodePipeline for CI/CD.
When I push the code changes, it deploys all the functions even only function is changed.
I want to avoid the deployment of all functions and the CI/CD should determine the changed function and deploy it. Rest of functions should not be deployed again.
Moreover, is there anyway to deal with such problems using AWS SAM, as at this stage I have an option to switch towards SAM by quitting serverless framework
Unfortunately there is no "native" way to do it. You would need to write a bash that will loop through the changed files and call sls deploy -s production -f for each one of them.
I was also faced this issue, and eventually it drove me to create an alternative.
Rocketsam takes advantage of sam local to allow deploying only changed functions instead of the entire microservice.
It also supports other cool features such as:
Fetching live logs for each function
Sharing code between functions
Template per function instead of one big template file
Hope it solves your issue :)