serverless-wsgi VS aws-lambda-java-libs

I hope your head is not spinning. Now you might think, Wait, I have a Flask or my Django app where the framework is taking care of the endpoints in my python code. Do I need to recreate several lambdas? A valid question. Luckily, there is also an awesome Plugin for that.

> But two years from now CloudFlare could be doing the exact same stuff Amazon is doing now, and customers are locked in again, because no source code.

I hear this argument often but it always rings hollow.

A friend had a first gen iPod – when he wanted to switch, he discovered that the music he bought on iTunes couldn't be moved anywhere else because of DRM. That's lock in.

But this morning I was looking at the source code of an app built against the Serverless framework[1] and what I'm seeing is a bog standard WSGI application that uses a library to transform the inbound AWS "proprietary bits" into WSGI[2]. I'm not worried about lock-in there because all API Gateway + Lambda do is "translate an HTTP request into a JSON object and toss it to an app"[3] – what source code am I missing? The underlying Lambda/APIGW code? OK, but do I need it to run it myself? Not really.

Many – most? – AWS products tend towards this analysis. S3 is so locked in that, what, we now have multiple very high quality alternatives that are API compatible?

The real risk of cloud vendor lock in, from where I sit, comes from egregious pricing models that make it cheap to get data in & expensive to push data out. But I'm not sure Cloudflare has the juice to make this play work: egress pricing is essentially free money for AWS, so they've got lots of room to cut costs there – from what I've heard from people who negotiate real bills with AWS, they're very happy to give you discounts there.

[1]: https://github.com/serverless/examples/tree/master/aws-pytho...

[2]: https://github.com/logandk/serverless-wsgi

[3]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide...

using https://github.com/logandk/serverless-wsgi

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/

This blog details how you can use some key serverless components from AWS like Amazon Eventbridge, AWS Lambda, and Simple Notification Service to setup a system that will monitor your site (which can be running anywhere) and send emails, text messages, slack messages, and more when the reachability status of your site changes.

I use the OpenWeather API to receive the current temperature data by providing the latitude and longitude coordinates as query strings in the request. A Lambda function invokes the weather API and sends the current temperature value as a custom metric to CloudWatch. I then graph the temperature values on a dashboard and activate an alarm when the temperature sinks below zero degrees Celsius.

After two years, I moved to a Web3 startup where I was given a lead software engineer role. This new role gave me more hands-on experience with AWS, where I've learned to implement serverless technologies like Lambda and DynamoDB.