Ways To Iteratively Develop Lambda Functions

Thanks for sending in all those B-Day wishes. I had some travel plans due to the same occasion and that also explains the delay in sending out this email update.

The last week was a short one — work wise. During my travel, I contemplated about the serverless things I did right, and also the wrong ones in this month. One aspect of serverless development I want to make better is the iterative development process.

To develop and deploy the Lambda functions alone, you don’t need much — as far as you are just trying out with something like NodeJS — where the code editor is supported. In case of Golang you have to develop the code locally, build it, and then upload the binary to the Lambda function.

Building the binary is indeed an additional step in developing Lambda functions with Go — some even frown upon — but it is also a performance booster.

Performance matters in the world of pay-per-use. A 10x improvement in performance roughly means the same extent of reduction in cloud spend.

To have a defined development cycle, for the last couple of months I have used Terraform and Amplify mainly to create and deploy Lambda functions, and a couple of days back I tried AWS SAM (Serverless Application Model) to have the taste of managing Lambda functions.