Building Scaleable Serverless Event-Driven Computing with AWS Lambda powered by BoxLang

ROOM A
PRESENTED BY
GAVIN PICKIN
Building Scalable Serverless
Event-Driven Computing
with AWS Lambda
powered by
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GAVIN PICKIN
SPEAKER AT ITB 2024
• Software Consultant for Ortus
• Work with ColdBox, CommandBox,
ContentBox APIs and VueJS every day!
• Working with Coldfusion since 1999 - V4
• Love learning and sharing the lessons learned
• From New Zealand, live in Bakersﬁeld, Ca
• Loving wife, lots of kids, and countless critters

AWS Lambda?
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Building Scalable Serverless Event-Driven Computing with AWS Lambda - powered by BoxLang

Why AWS Lambda?
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AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs
your code in response to events and
automatically manages the compute
resources, making it the fastest way to turn an
idea into a modern, production, serverless
applications.
https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/

What is Serverless?
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● Most people refer to Lambda a “serverless” programming
model.
● Serverless doesn’t mean that there are no servers
involved.
● There are always servers involved.

What is Serverless?
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● You just don’t see them
● You don’t manage them
● You can login and touch them.
● You write code for a speciﬁc runtime
● Deploy it to the serverless environment.
● Lambda takes care of everything else, including
scalability and core security.

Beneﬁts of Lambda
● No need for managing servers
● Automatic scaling
● Pay-as-you-go pricing
● Performance optimization
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Features of AWS Lambda?
● Extend other AWS services with custom logic
● Build custom backend services
● Bring your own code
● Completely automated administration
● Built-in fault tolerance
● Package and deploy functions as container images
● Automatic scaling
● Connect to relational databases
● Fine-grained control over performance
● Connect to shared ﬁle systems
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https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/features/

Features of AWS Lambda?
● Run code in response to Amazon CloudFront requests
● Orchestrate multiple functions
● Integrated security model
● Trust and integrity controls
● Only pay for what you use
● Flexible resource model
● Integrate Lambda with your favorite operational tools
● Achieve up to 34% better price performance with functions
powered by Graviton2
● Monitoring and observability
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Use Cases for Lambda
● Quickly process data at scale
● Run interactive web and mobile backends
● Enable powerful ML insights
● Create event-driven applications
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Lambda - Pricing
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https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/

Getting started with BoxLang AWS Lambdas
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https://boxlang.ortusbooks.com/getting-started/installation/binaries

Getting started with BoxLang AWS Lambdas
This repository contains the AWS Lambda Runtime for
the BoxLang language. This runtime allows you to run
BoxLang code in AWS Lambda functions. The runtime is
built using the AWS Lambda Custom Runtime API and
the BoxLang interpreter.
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https://github.com/ortus-boxlang/boxlang-aws-lambda

BoxLang AWS Lambda - Usage
To use it, you need to create a Lambda function and
specify Java 21 as the runtime. The class that executes
your BoxLang code is
ortus.boxlang.runtime.aws.LambdaRunner. By
convention it will execute a Lambda.bx ﬁle in the root
(/var/task/Lambda.bx) of the Lambda function, via the
run() method.
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BoxLang AWS Lambda - Usage
Method Signature:
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// Lambda.bx
class{
function run( event, context, response ){
// Your code here
}
}

BoxLang AWS Lambda - Run Arguments
Run Arguments
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● The event parameter is the event data that is passed to the Lambda function as
a Struct.
● The context parameter is the context object that is passed to the Lambda
function. This matches the AWS Lambda context object:
com.amazonaws.services.lambda.runtime.Context.
● The response parameter is the response object that is passed to the Lambda
function.

BoxLang AWS Lambda - Response Struct
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The response object is a Struct that you can use to set the response data. The
response object has the following keys:
● statusCode : The HTTP status code for the response.
● headers : A Struct of headers to send in the response.
● body : The body of the response, which can be anything.
The BoxLang lambda runner will return the response object as the response to
the Lambda function as a JSON object.

BoxLang AWS Lambda - Testing Locally
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Build
gradle shadowJar
gradle buildMainZip

BoxLang AWS Lambda - Testing Locally
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https://docs.aws.amazon.com/serverless-application-model/latest/developerguide/what-is-sam.html
The AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) is a
toolkit that improves the developer experience of building
and running serverless applications on AWS.
Requires: Docker running

BoxLang AWS Lambda - AWS SAM beneﬁts:
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https://docs.aws.amazon.com/serverless-application-model/latest/developerguide/what-is-sam.html
● Deﬁne your application infrastructure code quickly, using less code
● Manage your serverless applications through their entire
development lifecycle
● Quickly provision permissions between resources with AWS SAM
connectors
● Continuously sync local changes to the cloud as you develop
● Manage your Terraform serverless applications

Invoking Lambda Locally with Sample Data
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sam local invoke bxFunction
--event=workbench/sampleEvents/api.json
--event=workbench/sampleEvents/event.json

Invoking Lambda Locally with Debug Mode
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--event=workbench/sampleEvents/api.json --debug
--event=workbench/sampleEvents/event.json --debug

Custom Lambda Function
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If you don't want to use the convention of Lambda.bx
then you can setup an environment variable called:
BOXLANG_LAMBDA_CLASS
with the full path to the BoxLang class that will execute
your code.
The class must have a run() method that matches the
signature above.

Debugging your Lambda Function
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You can enable debug mode by setting the environment
variable BOXLANG_LAMBDA_DEBUG to true.
This will output debug information to the Lambda logs.

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// Lambda.bx
class{
function run( event, context, response ){
// response.statusCode = 200; set by default
response.headers = {
"Content-Type" : "text/plain"
};
response.body = "Hello World";
}
}
Hello World

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However, if you don't even want to deal with the response struct, you can just use
a return and whatever you return will be placed for you in the response.body.
// Lambda.bx
class{
function run( event, context ){
return "Hello World";
}
}
Skip the response object

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SUBTITLE - IF NEEDED

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In order to deploy your function to AWS Lambda, you need to package the
runtime and your BoxLang code into a zip ﬁle. The zip ﬁle should contain the
following structure:
+ Lambda.bx
/lib
+ boxlang-aws-lambda-1.0.0-all.jar
Packaging your BoxLang Lambda

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● Brian Klaas - the CFML AWS Guy
Great AWS Content including NodeJS Lambdas, StepFunctions and much more
https://brianklaas.net/
●
Interesting Links

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THANK YOU TO OUR
SPONSORS
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Building Scaleable Serverless Event-Driven Computing with AWS Lambda powered by BoxLang

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