lambda – lockhead.info

At re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas AWS has announced a new feature for AWS Lambda that allows you to reduce your lambda startup times for Java based functions – SnapStart. With this post you are going to understand how the feature works, how it can be enabled, how you will benefit from it and how it will reduce your costs for AWS lambda. The functionality needs to be activated (“opt-in”) and has a few pre-requites for your functions that I will also share with you. It is currently only available if you use Java (Corretto 11) as a runtime. Other runtimes (e.g. Python, Typescript) will be available at a later date.

What is AWS Lambda SnapStart – and reduced latency for cold starts?

SnapStart is a new feature that helps to improve the “cold starts” of your lambda function.

AWS Lambda is a serverless possibility to execute code or a part of your application on AWS. The service can be used with different languages – Typescript/Node.JS, Python, Golang, … and Java. Lambda can be seen as “function as a service” with very convenient integration possibilities. Under the hood of Lambda, AWS has a very quick and mature provisioning system that brings up a container that executes your code. AWS Lambda as a “serverless” service allows you to not pay anything for your deployed infrastructure if it is not being used – this is also known as “scale-to-zero”. AWS Lambda is billed by “usage time” of the capacity that your lambda functions use – a lambda function can run up to 15min, but most of the lambda functions execute within a few seconds. Because of the “scale-to-zero” functionality, there is not always a “running” version of your code on AWS. This is where AWS distinguishes between “cold starts” and “warm starts” for your lambda function.

When SnapStart is enabled, function code is initialized once when a function version is published. Lambda then takes a snapshot of the memory and disk state of the initialized execution environment, persists the encrypted snapshot, and caches it for low-latency access. When the function is first invoked or subsequently scaled, Lambda resumes new execution environments from the persisted snapshot instead of initializing from scratch, avoiding several seconds of variable latency.

So – why is SnapStart an “opt-in” feature?

AWS has decided to not make SnapStart a default functionality of AWS Lambda, because there are certain pre-requisites for being able to use this new functionality.

The most important one is that the code executed as part of the lambda function cannot rely on the “randomization” features of Java, and this has implications for the code that you write. Please read the SnapChart documentation for further details – the FAQ is very detailed on this. This does not only include the code that YOU write as part of your lambda function but also the code of every library that you use as part of your code.

Other things to consider are that you cannot rely on network connections that you created/set up during the initialization of your code to be still valid and available when your function is resumed from a snapshort. This means that you will need to verify any network connections (e.g. connections for a backend database) before you actually use it.

Any ephemeral data that you rely on can be invalid when your function is resumed from a snapshot – and this means that you will need to ensure that any ephemeral data is still valid if you want to access it. This could be temporary credentials, machine learning models or just temporary data that you use within your function.

In it’s documentation, AWS also provides a bunch of examples and best practices to make sure that your code is “SnapSafe” and can work with this new functionality without causing problems.

How do you activate AWS Lambda SnapStart?

You can activate AWS Lambda either in the AWS console or through the AWS cli. Surprisingly this feature also comes with direct CloudFormation, CDK and SDK support. Please remember that after activating it, you will need to create a new version of lambda function that you want to test.

Further details can be found in the AWS documentation.

Let’s go back to the “teaser” of this post – How can YOU safe costs with this functionality?

For Lambda functions you are based on the number of requests for your functions, the allocated memory and the time that it takes to execute your java code. The duration is calculated from the time your code begins executing until it returns or otherwise terminated, rounded up to the nearest 1ms.

The total duration is a combination of the initialization code (in the constructor of your function) and the code in the “handler”.
With SnapStart enabled, the “initialization code” / phase is moved to the provisioning of the function (when you set it up) – and when the function is executed the “initialization phase” is replaced by re-starting the function from the already created snapshot.

This means that for functions, that have an intense “initialization” phase the potential savings are bigger than for functions that run all of their code in the “handler”. More details around how to optimize your Java functions for cold starts can be found in this blog.

Let’s do a few calculations on how this helps us to safe money:

The table assumes that the initialization phase is reduced to 25 milliseconds (which is not technically correct according to the AWS documentation, but its as close as I can guess today).

What this table shows is that the SnapStart feature will help us to reduce our costs for AWS Lambda significantly, if we have Lambda functions that have a longer initialization time than “handler” execution time.

Overall I calculated between 10% and 60% savings with this feature, depending on your use case. Please be aware: This is calculation/guessing only, I have not yet measured that during a test! For further analysis and details you will need to analyze your current performance metrics of your lambda functions and perform additional tests and calculations.
Before you can use the feature, as already mentioned, you will need to verify that your lambda code is “SnapSafe”.

If you try out this new feature and gain meaningful experiences out of it, please let me know and reach out to me in the comments section, through LinkedIn or E-Mail.

Wow, this is a long title 😉

In this post I am going to use CDK Pipelines to build a demo Flutter application hosted on AWS S3 with a Backend powered by AWS Lambda (using Function URLs).
The CDK code will be in Java, the Lambda functions in Typescript and the WebApp in Dart. Why? Because I love trying out things 🙂

The code used here is not production ready and does not fulfill required security best practices! 🙂

The CI/CD pipeline

The CI/CD pipeline for this project uses CDK Pipelines and that means it is build on top of AWS CodePipeline (which under the hood uses CodeBuild, CodeStar and other services to be functional).

It consists of different stages that build and deploy the corresponding part of the application:
– one stage for each lambda function
– one stage for the build and deployment of the Flutter application

The stages required by the CDK Pipeline to update itself are automatically added but not part of our code:

public CdkPipelineStack(final Construct parent, final String id, final String branch, final StackProps props) {
		super(parent, id, props);

	String connectionArn = "arn:aws:codestar-connections:eu-central-1:xxx:connection/xxx";
	final CodePipeline pipeline = CodePipeline.Builder.create(this, getCodepipelineName(branch))
			.pipelineName(getCodepipelineName(branch)).dockerEnabledForSynth(true)
			.synth(CodeBuildStep.Builder.create("SynthStep")
					.input(CodePipelineSource.connection("lock128/cdk-codepipeline-flutter", branch,
							ConnectionSourceOptions.builder().connectionArn(connectionArn).build()))
					.installCommands(List.of("npm install -g aws-cdk" // Commands to run before build
					)).commands(List.of("mvn test", "mvn package", // Language-specific build commands
							"npx cdk synth", // Synth command (always same)
							"bash start_codecov.sh"))
					.build())
				.build();

	pipeline.addStage(new CheckAgeLambdaStage(this, "DeployCheckAgeLambda"), getCheckAgeStageOpts());
	pipeline.addStage(new PaperSizeStage(this, "DeployPaperSizeStage"), getPaperSizeStageOpts());
	pipeline.addStage(new CalculatorStage(this, "DeployCalculatorStage"), getCalculatorStageOpts());

	PolicyStatement flutterDeployPermission = getDeployPermissions();
	CodeBuildStep buildAndDeployManual = CodeBuildStep.Builder.create("Execute Flutter Build and CodeCov")
			.commands(getFlutterBuildShellSteps()).rolePolicyStatements(Arrays.asList(flutterDeployPermission))
			.build();

	pipeline.addStage(new FlutterBuildStage(this, "FlutterBuildStage"),
			getFlutterStageOptions(buildAndDeployManual));

}

This is the definition of the CI/CD pipeline, it uses our Github repository as the source of the code and automatically starts after a push to the repository on the main branch.
The “Flutter Build Stage” is the one that currently builds the Flutter web application, deploys it and makes it available to the end user. Going forward, to make best use of Flutter, we would need to expand this stage to also be able to build an iOS application, an android application or an application for any other platform supported by Flutter. As a “goal” I would personally also want to extend this stage to be able to publish the apps to the corresponding stores (App Store, Play Store, Windows Store, …) – Thanks to my friends at cosee for the help and guidance around this process!

The architecture diagram of the application

What we are using to show-case the usage of AWS CodePipeline, Flutter as an application and AWS Lambda Function URLs as backend is not really an “application” – but it can do dynamic things and it can easily be extended to include a database backend, etc.

Infrastructure as Code using AWS CDK in Java

In this section you are going to have a look on the CDK code required to provision the infrastructure on AWS.
We are using AWS CDK written in Java – and because of that Maven as a build tool (Maven is the default tool for CDK projects – I’ve already used Gradle as build tool and that works in the same way.

The possibility of writing Infrastructure Code in Java is a great thing because it gives us the option to build on top of our existing skills – and I’ve written enough lines of Java in my career to feel comfortable using it to provision the infrastructure.
This is one of the best things in CDK: You can write your Infrastructure code in Java, Typescript, Python, … – and that helps us to build teams that only have “one” language as a “core skill” – one team might choose to develop in Java, anotherone in Typescript, another team could use Go – this allows the teams to build up mastery in a specific language!

In our example however, we are not making use of this possibility – I’ve choosen to rather go the opossite way: Combine a few languages, just to show that it works 😉

The CDK code consists of four “stacks” – each of the Stack representing one “component” in this application.
In our example these four stacks are part of one CDK Application & one CodePipeline. In bigger projects, you might want to split these out into seperate applications – which introduces a lot tof things to consider (e.g. how do they fit and work together, etc.).

While writing this post, the four stacks combined are 129 lines of source code. With the help of the CDK Constructs that are being used this translates to over 1k lines of code in CloudFormation. We are only using L2 constructs here – there is way more constructs available that you can use in the Constructs Hub and also a lot of guidance regarding the usage of CDK over at CDKPatterns.

CDK Stack that provisions the infrastructure for the Flutter hosted website

Making a S3 bucket available to host our Flutter application becomes a very short piece of Java code as shown in the picture above.

Lambda functions behind Function URLs in Typescript and Python

This was definately one of the most awaited announcements in the Serverless space this year: The GA of the “Function URLs” for Lambda on AWS – and this is the reason for me using these as a backend in this showcase.
With this announcment, it is possible to directly expose your application running on AWS Lambda behind an HTTPs endpoint! Without an ApiGateway, Proxy, …
Provisioning the infrastructure for the lambda function with the function URL functionality activated is only a few lines in CDK:

CDK Stack for the Check Age Lambda function with the activation of the Function URL

These Lambda functions will now horizontally scale without us as a developer getting involved. More details on function URLs – there is a lot of good posts on it around like this one or this one.
Around scalability, fellow community builder Vlad has written up a great guide around scalability for containers on his website.

Web Single Page Application built using Flutter and the benefits of using Flutter

Flutter as a multi-platform, developer driven tool gives a lot of flexibility. With a single code base, you are able to publish your application to various targets. In this example, we are using the target platform “web” – which compiles the Dart code to a single page application.

This application is automatically aware of the size of your screen and is interative – which is another cool thing that Flutter takes away from you as a developer. A lot of organizations use Flutter today and the cookbook gives you an easy and good start into developing Flutter applications.

Our example application has three input fields that take input and pass it back to our Function URLs – and then automatically update a Text Widget with the results of the Function URL call. This implementation will work on all platforms.

What did you learn in this post?

You have learned how easy it is to provision AWS infrastructure using AWS CDK. You have also seen that you can easily combine different programming languages in a single CDK application and got an experience on how a CI/CD pipeline can help to automatically deploy our application using AWS CodeBuild.
In addition to that, you have looked at Flutter as a multi-platform development tool.

I’d be glad to get your inputs into my Github repository as a pull request or just as comments on the project itself.

Next steps

Further expansions needed to this project:
– use the CloudFormation Exports of the Lambda functions in the Flutter application instead of hardcoding the URLs for the Lambda Function URLs- enhance security for Lambda Function URLs
– add CloudFront in front of S3 to allow HTTPs connections to the Flutter App
– enhance CI/CD pipeline to package Android App using Flutter
– enhance CI/CD pipeline to package iOS App using Flutter
– enhance CI/CD pipeline to package Windows App using Flutter
Feel free to contribute and add your contributions to this project.

Listen to Werner Vogels talking about the benefits of CDK

Tag: lambda

How to save costs using AWS Lambda SnapStart for Java based functions