aws-lambda-web-adapter VS Zappa

In the next part of the series I'll make the introduction to the AWS Lambda Web Adapter and explain how our Serverless Spring Boot application on AWS can make use of it.

Lambda Web Adapter (LWA) is an open-source project that enables running Web apps on Lambda functions without the need to change or adapt the code.

Thanks to the AWS Lambda Web Adapter, the application built as a (good old) REST/HTTP API using a familiar library (in this case, Gin.

Using the excellent Lambda web adapter extension with a container, you can very easily move a function from Lambda to Fargate or Apprunner if cost becomes an issue. This optionality is of high value, and shouldn't be overlooked.

We will use AWS Lambda Web Adapter to run our Node.js Application on AWS Lambda.

For such frameworks, I would look at Lambda Web Adapter (https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-web-adapter/tree/main/examples). Both frameworks have specific examples for them that allow for the execution of those within a Lambda context with few, if any, code changes. For spring, specifically, using Lambda Snapstart can significantly improve cold-start performance. You can read more about Java and Spring framework in this blog post that contains also a code example https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/reducing-java-cold-starts-on-aws-lambda-functions-with-snapstart/ With regards to Flask, you can also use a project like: https://pypi.org/project/flask-lambda/

With the lambda web adapter[1], you shouldn't need to make any code changes for web projects, just some dockerfile changes which are only used if it is running as a lambda, so the same container image should still work on ecs or another cloud. [1]https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-web-adapter

Additionally, there is this tool you can use to use the same image in a lambda and any other container runtime. https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-web-adapter

You can point your platform team to this: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-web-adapter , which they can use to get your service running in Lambda.

If people aren't familiar, there's a similar project for Python that's fantastic: https://github.com/zappa/Zappa

Chalice was a consequence, a reaction from AWS to the release of (Zappa Framework)[https://github.com/zappa/Zappa] that provide a very good alternative to migrate very quickly a Django/Flask or any WSGI compliant solution in Python.

Use Zappa https://github.com/zappa/Zappa and host as a Lambda, simple setup and deployment, Lambda only costs when processing requests, no servers to mess around with

One of my favorite options that is probably the most cost-effective is to deploy using a 'severless' model on AWS Lambda using zappa which supports deploying Python webapps to AWS in this way. Zappa also makes it super easy to deploy in just a couple commands! The README includes instructions for everything you might need, including handling sensitive information like your database passwords, running django management commands, setting up DNS, etc.

Deployment works nicely with Docker. I often use AWS AppRunner because it's really easy and just scales. Some people use AWS Lambda with Zappa but I don't recommend it unless you really want to spend less than $15 a month. You will probably need Django Storages to save uploads to an S3 bucket. At some stage you might want to put a CloudFront distribution in front of everything but the configuration of the caching behaviour might be a bit confusing when you do it the first time.

It doesn't have to be an either-or! I have several apps in production that were developed on Django or Flask, and deployed to Lambda using Zappa.

If you need a relational DB, you can use AWS Aurora or RDS and use cloud functions ('lambda' in AWS) that you can invoke with HTTP to process the document first. Zappa will do a lot of the configuration for you if you go that route.

Lambda + API gateway, this library bundles a Django application into a lambda https://github.com/zappa/Zappa . 1 million free invokes from aws, scale to zero, plugs into your RDS

I use Zappa, it just schedules a frequent execution of the lambda: https://github.com/zappa/Zappa#keeping-the-server-warm