aws-sam-cli VS serverless-application-model

aws-sam-cli-linux

Does anyone have any success with API Gateway/Lamba for local environment with hot-reloading? I was playing around with “sam local start-api” a few weeks ago with along with CDK but it doesn’t seem like hot-reloading is supported, and need to manually restart for code changes to reflect, which is currently stopping me from trying out the API Gateway/Lamba combo further due to inefficient DX. Here’s a GitHub issue about it: https://github.com/aws/aws-sam-cli/issues/901

Mostly due to lack of proper documentation it was difficult to get the HTTPApi syntax correct. The yaml file is very picky for CORS configuration on an HTTPApi. Luckily I found this github issue which allowed me to troubleshoot my yaml file.

No, it's not just muscle memory. It doesn't work with podman. That's what I'm talking about https://github.com/aws/aws-sam-cli/issues/1668

AWS SAM CLI with the support of Typescript is still in Beta. If you want more advanced features maybe you should not use it. Lately, in version 1.49.0 External and Loader properties have been added. If you want to share your feedback and/or requests this issue has been created.

I spent a while creating a custom runtime to use the native-image agent to harvest config from my Lambda, and then patching sam cli to work in Docker user networks... after pushing through all that, I still didn't get a working build - the native-image compiler just doesn't support everything (or didn't support my feature set, at the time - there has been a new release since then). In my case I think it was Guice that defeated me.

SAM support for TypeScript has been lagging for some time, but a pull request was just merged that should change that. It looks like we'll be able to add an aws_sam key in the package.json file to enable building within the SAM engine as part of sam build. Although this PR has been merged to aws-lambda-builders, the engine behind sam build, it will still need to be added to aws-sam-cli and released (to much fanfare, one expects) before it can be used with SAM.

I am installing SAM CLI on windows and its super simple. All I need to do is Click on this MSI installer.

sem-version java 8 wget https://github.com/aws/aws-sam-cli/releases/latest/download/aws-sam-cli-linux-x86_64.zip unzip aws-sam-cli-linux-x86_64.zip -d sam-installation sudo ./sam-installation/install checkout cd java-app-backend cache restore build-java-app-backend-$SEMAPHORE_GIT_BRANCH sam deploy --no-confirm-changeset --stack-name serverless-web-application-java-backend --capabilities CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND CAPABILITY_IAM

The complete solution with SAM is available here.

There are many options to deploy Serverless Applications in AWS and one of them is SAM, the Serverless Application Model. I chose to use it here, because it doesn't add too many layers of abstraction between what's being deployed and the code we write and our infrastructure is quite simple.

The solution uses AWS SAM with the global configuration for Lambda functions and the public API you can use to access Apache Zeppelin. The stack deployment provides the URL as an output value.

When you combine this with the AWS Serverless Application Model you can also very easily include your dependencies. Or use a compiled language like golang for your Lambda functions. You simply run sam build before you run the aws cloudformation package and aws cloudformation deploy commands. SAM will build the binary and update the template to point to the newly built binary. Package will then upload it to S3 and replace the local reference to the S3 location. Deploy can then create or update the stack or you can use the CloudFormation integration in CodePipeline.

I'm a big fan of using an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach for any project. My go to tools for this are the Servlerless Application Model (SAM) and it's associated CLI (SAM CLI). For more official use cases and for cross platform apps I typically use Terraform.

AWS SAM

Kicking off the tour and not starting a war, but I'm going to be using the Serverless Application Model.

The diagram here is super simple. I'm going to write something a little later that shows how this code could fit into a bigger workflow, but for now, I'm keeping it basic. And yes, that's the SAM Squirrel in there.

Interestingly, AWS CDK and SAM are both explicitly mentioned. While CDK broadly addresses Infrastructure as Code, SAM is highlighted for its role in developing serverless data pipelines - a hugely underrated concept.

Naturally, there are several options available to declare your cloud resources. The options with the most popularity are the CDK, AWS CloudFormation, SST, Serverless framework, Terraform, and AWS SAM. There are others, but when talking about Infrastructure as Code (IaC), these are the ones you hear about most often.