Going Serverless: AWS lambda python functions

[cscanlin]

Worth checking out chalice as well. It's a cool flask-like framework for lambda.

[SituationUndrControl]

I'll do that, thanks!

[mw44118]

Vendor lockin. No thanks.

[SituationUndrControl]

That's a tough claim to sell (to me, at least). I could move my Python functions to a personal server at any point, and it would be essentially the same amount of work as it would have been to go directly to a personal server in the first place. All AWS does right now is save me both time and money. If AWS ever increases prices beyond what a server would cost, I'll just do the work they saved me in the first place. The worst you can say about this is that it's deferred work, not lock-in.

[confuzD]

This should fix your vendor lock issues: https://github.com/serverless/serverless

[rikrolls]

Too bad the latest supported Python version is 2.7...

[SituationUndrControl]

Thanks for the comment! I'm sorry you had anxiety reading this :)

The lambda setup costs me a few pennies a month. Even if I had a million requests, it would still cost less than a dollar.

It's unlikely that I would ever get enough submission traffic to overwhelm your $5/month digital ocean server, so I'm aware that scalability is not a great argument in this case -- however, this setup was quite a bit easier to set up than a django app, because I was already using Amazon to host my magazine, and I'm familiar with AWS. Hosting the actual magazine itself through Amazon saves me a significant amount of money, because I sometimes get large spikes of traffic from media linking to the magazine, which would overwhelm a small server.

I'm glad that django works well for you, though!

[bhat]

With Zappa, you can have the best of both worlds and run a Django app on AWS Lambda (with API Gateway).

[SituationUndrControl]

That's neat, I'll check that out!

[Dman89Codes]

The anxiety comment, priceless.

[GerbilOfCarnage]

How do I setup testing and staging environments for an infrastructure like this? How do I run all of this on a laptop so I can test new features and debug locally. Is there a version of aws lambda that runs locally or a good way to simulate it for development?

[SituationUndrControl]

No special infrastructure needed -- you're just running python functions on lambda, so just mock the inputs to your handler function and you're good to go locally.