serverless-application-model VS aws-lambda-java-libs

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.

AWS Lambda simplifies composable applications by offering serverless execution, seamless integration with AWS services, automatic scaling, and cost efficiency without the need to manage servers.

Deploying Dart functions to AWS Lambda enables you to utilize them not only within AWS Lambda but also integrate them with services like Amazon API Gateway, allowing you to leverage them in Flutter applications as well. This unified codebase in Dart offers great convenience.

Event Producers: Generate streams of events, which can be implemented using straightforward microservices with AWS Lambda (for serverless computing), Amazon DynamoDB Streams (to captures changes to DynamoDB tables in real-time), Amazon S3 Event Notifications (Notify when certain events occur in S3 buckets) or AWS Fargate (a serverless compute engine for containers).

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda is a serverless function-as-a-service (FaaS) platform that lets you deploy, run, and scale code in the cloud as self-contained functions without having to manually configure any infrastructure. Lambda runs your functions on demand in response to specific events, such as an HTTP request from the internet or activity in another AWS service.

FaaS is specifically focused on building and running applications as a set of independent functions or microservices. Major cloud providers like AWS (Lambda), Microsoft Azure (Functions), and Google Cloud (Cloud Functions) offer FaaS platforms that allow developers to write and deploy individual functions without managing the underlying infrastructure.

So AWS Lambda is basically a serverless computing service that is offered by AWS. It enables developers to run the code in response to various events. It protects the developers from the pain of managing the servers. Using a serverless execution model helps the developers to handle provision, manage and scale the servers automatically. Through this approach the developers can fully focus on writing the code instead of dealing with other aspects.

The first product that popularized the term “serverless” was AWS Lambda, which is both the prototypical and archetypical function as a service provider. It also has a great name, which pings back to its envisioned place in the cloud of the future. In computer programming, a lambda, often referred to as a lambda function or lambda expression, is a concise way to represent an anonymous function, which is a function without a name. The concept originates from lambda calculus in mathematical logic and has been adopted by many programming languages, each with its own syntax and characteristics.

You can build a custom config rules in 2 ways, using AWS Lambda and CloudFormation Guard. Lambda gives you a lot of flexibility, but it also brings complexity of maintaining. CloudFormation Guard is a bit more lightweight in that regard. Yes, you still need to maintain the logic to determine when your resource is compliant or not. But you need to do this in both cases, thus my go to preference is CloudFormation Guard.

AWS Lambda: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/