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The task host is the execution environment that receives the invocation event and is responsible for resolving the invocation schedule. In this case, the host is a Lambda function, and unfortunately the event payload only contains a reference to the CloudWatch event rule ARN that invoked the Lambda, rather than the rule itself. So, I have to jump through some hoops to split the rule ARN to get the rule name using the resource parser, then get the rule with its schedule from the CloudWatch events API before parsing it with the schedule parser. This all comes together in the host to load the tasks and filter them based on the invocation schedule, and if there are any, runs them via the task runner and awaits the results:
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Feeling comfortable I had all the components to build this tool, I created a quick proof of concept to validate the technology choices and the approach. I used the serverless framework to get up and running quickly with a single function that ran a basic web scraping task using chrome-aws-lambda and puppeteer-core. The serverless framework enables you to add AWS CloudWatch event rules as schedules to your Lambda functions with a few of lines of YAML. Sure enough, the solution was packaged in under 50MB and once deployed it ran on schedule and did exactly what I expected.
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SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
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Puppeteer automates Chromium browsers (headless and non-headless), but can Chromium run in a Lambda function? Not without some great work from the community to create a Chrome build for the AWS Lambda runtime. There’s also a Lambda layer solution for this too, although I haven’t tried this approach yet. Another great feature of this package is that it runs headless when running in Lambda and non-headless when running locally - so it’s frictionless to develop, test and run your scripts.
