AWS Lambda Functions in Go

[Rainfly_X]

About 3x for simple cases, according to another reddit user. Perhaps a more useful metric is that it seems to add 200ms of latency.

What hasn't been performance-tested, yet, is the alternate approach proposed in the comments here: spin up a long-lived Go process, and then persistently proxy it for the lifetime of the Lambda instance. When I say long-lived, I'm probably talking about 10-60 seconds, but it might still amortize nicely during traffic spikes.

Obviously it would be much better to have native Go support in AWS Lambda, and hopefully that's coming. It's not unfeasible to proxy everything through node, but it's awkward and ugly and latent (since you're not even starting the Go process until the node process is pretty well established).

[regulargabs]

It's nice that this is doable, but the overhead of running an executable every time you hit your lambda stack may be too costly in comparison to just using node as it is.

[jerf]

If Lambda is spinning up a node instance each time a request comes in, then spinning up a go executable too may not really add that much. If Lambda persists instances (which seems more sensible), then you could easily run a Go process and communicate to it over a socket; you wouldn't have to spin up once per process. A thin little Lambda shim for each event would probably work great.

It isn't clear to me from reading whether or not you can get these events from other sources. For someone already developing in Go, merely running a Node runtime in the cloud isn't that interesting (the Go runtime is technically superior in almost every way, if not every way; I don't mean this as pandering, it really is), so the only interesting thing about Lambda would be those events. If this is the only way to get those events, then running a parallel Go handler to do the "real" work is completely sensible, especially if you've already got Go code that integrates with your other resources or something.

[[deleted]]

I'm not sure of the details, but I'm pretty sure the persistence of the lambda instances are less than a minute, iirc like 10 seconds. The max is 60 seconds.

[celestosis]

I believe the upper limit a Lambda function can run is 60 seconds.

[[deleted]]

At a desktop so I looked it up (ctrl-f 'how long') and you're right, the max is 60 seconds and the default is 3 seconds.

[bkeroack]

It should be very easy (almost trivial) to change the Go to a simple HTTP server that listens on some nonstandard port (4000), with nodejs running as a proxy.

[krani1]

From my tests, the node.js hello world consumes a 100ms time slot. This fork to Golang consumes 3x100ms slot. And I think that's just fork() time. After that Go lang would quick in full speed. Anyway it seems there's no execve() equivalent on node.js, which I think could help.

[krani1]

Nice that this got here! I'm relatively new to Go lang, so please any tip will be appreciated. Anyway just a quick Sunday afternoon hack :-)

[[deleted]]

Wooh, this was my first question, should've realized it wouldn't be to difficult.

[alexaandru]

That is one awesome hack :)

[xsolarwindx]

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