assemblylift VS hyper

AssemblyLift is an open platform for cloud-native application development. AssemblyLift provides a portable, function-oriented framework and WebAssembly-based runtime which can be deployed to AWS Lambda or Kubernetes. The AssemblyLift CLI generates HashiCorp Terraform infrastructure code from simple TOML definitions, and takes care of compiling and packaging functions and services for deployment. To make a clichéd comparison, think of it as Infrastructure on Rails 😛

Since our last post introducing the AssemblyLift v0.4-alpha series, we've had two new alpha releases which introduced some major additions & improvements!

Today we're making available the first alpha release of AssemblyLift v0.4. This initial release brings a few exiting improvements to AssemblyLift including

After nearly two years in part-time development, AssemblyLift has been through three major revisions, sitting now at v0.3.2.

In this guide we'll use AssemblyLift to deploy our Lambda function, and define our API and an authorizer. AssemblyLift is an open platform which allows you to quickly develop high-performance serverless applications. Service functions are written in the Rust programming language and compiled to WebAssembly. The AssemblyLift CLI takes care of compiling and deploying your code, as well as building and deploying all the needed infrastructure!

Normally what we've described above would be a pretty complicated set up (and a much longer article 😜). Luckily we can use AssemblyLift to do all the heavy work for us!

This article will walk through building and deploying a simple static site, served using AWS Lambda and API Gateway. To accomplish this we will use AssemblyLift, an open-source platform designed to quickly & easily accomplish such a task.

If you've never heard of it or just need a reminder, AssemblyLift is an open platform for developing cloud-native applications. At its core are the AssemblyLift Runtime and the AssemblyLift CLI. The runtime provides an environment for executing compiled WebAssembly (WASM) on infrastructure such as AWS Lambda, and is one of the more unique aspects of the platform which we'll dig into more below.

Service TOML definitions now support specifying authorizers by ID for each function. These map to API Gateway authorizers; currently only IAM and JWT are supported. See the pull request for examples.

> If you are equally picky and constrain yourself to parts of the ecosystem which care about binary size, you still have more options and can avoid size issues.

What's an example of this for, say, libcurl? On my system it has a tiny number of recursive dependencies, around a dozen. [0] Furthermore if I want to write a C program that uses libcurl I have to download zero bytes of data ... because it's a shared library that is already installed on my system, since so many programs already use it.

I don't really know the appropriate comparison for Rust. reqwest seems roughly comparable, but it's an HTTP client library, and not a general purpose network client like curl. Obviously curl can do a lot more. Even the list of direct dependencies for reqwest is quite long [1], and it's built on top of another http library [2] that has its own long list of dependencies, a list that includes tokio, no small library itself.

In terms of final binary size, the installed size of the curl package on my system, which includes both the command line tool and development dependencies for libcurl, is 1875.03 KiB.

[0] I'm excluding the dependency on the ca-certificates package, since this only provides the certificate chain for TLS and lots of programs rely on it.

[1] https://crates.io/crates/reqwest/0.11.24/dependencies

[2] https://crates.io/crates/hyper/0.14.28/dependencies

hyper-based HTTP server generating JSON responses. Written in Rust.

tokio / hyper / toml / serde / serde_json / json5 / console

Using Rust here was immensely helpful, using libraries made by the community like https://github.com/hyperium/hyper really powered up the development of Signway, so glad to see this kind of awesome crates made public. Hope that it continues to be like that despite the current controversies.

- Discord sends a slightly weird request by specifying content length (a bug in hyper we've not yet upgraded to fix, https://github.com/hyperium/hyper/commit/fb90d30c02d8f7cdc9a643597d5c4ca7a123f3dd)