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A small note on the Rust AWS SDK. It is currently in Developer Preview. However, the project's latest README indicates that it's production-ready, but not production-supported. More of a use-at-your-own-risk type of thing. At this point, I personally would be comfortable shipping with it, but I know that some might prefer something that is marked production-ready. If you want to explore another AWS SDK, rusoto might be for you. However, I imagine the SDK will go GA soon. That's a hunch and NOTHING official. I am not speaking for AWS here.
I've been trying to learn Rust for the better part of this year. My curiosity peaked a few years back when I learned the AWS-led Firecracker was developed with the language. And I've continued to want to learn it ever since. Fast-forward and I'm jumping both feet in. That's usually how I work. I must admit that right now, I'm the most noob of noobs, but that's not going to keep me from sharing what I'm up to and what I'm learning. For me, this blog is as much about sharing as it is about learning and communicating to those reading that it's OK to be where you are in your journey. There are no straight lines. Only periods of growth and plateaus. In this article, I'll walk you through consuming an SQS Event with Lambda and Rust.
As with most of my articles, there is a fully functioning repository attached. You can find the code hosted on GitHub. It is easily deployable with SAM and outlines the things you'll need to get going.
My journey through consuming an SQS Event with Lambda and Rust was enhanced when I embraced Cargo Lambda. Per the documentation:
Another thing to point out is that async is a thing in Rust. I'm not going to begin to dive into this paradigm in this article, but know it's handled by the awesome Tokio framework.
In Rust, you can bring in external libraries, called Crates. Think of Crates.io like you would NPM, Yarn, NuGet, Maven or another external dependency manager. For comparison, I greatly prefer it to the Git-style approach of Golang.
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.