[ANN] Pharo Lambda Runtime

Hi,

Last month Amazon extended their serverless runtime platform AWS Lambda with support for custom runtimes. I created a Pharo Lambda Runtime so now we can implement Lambda functions in Smalltalk and easily deploy them on the Lambda platform. Lamba has quite a large "free-tier", more than enough to do some experiments and to host small applications for free.

See the GitHub project for more details https://github.com/jvdsandt/pharo-aws-toolbox

Cheers,

Jan.

Hi Tim,

Yes, I read that you got Pharo working via the Javascript runtime. It should now be much easier and faster.

I still have to figure out the best way to create a deployment image. With the new bootstrap/modular setup of Pharo 7 it should be possible to create a lean-and-mean runtime image that can run in the cheapest 128MB max. ram configuration.

Jan.

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 2:18 PM Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]> wrote:

Cool - I was using a JS shim and had asked AWS many times why they couldn’t open it up wider... 

Now I’m back from my travels I’ll reincarnate my previous work and see how it works with this. I was looking forward to doing more with Lambda, so this is great timing.

 Tim

Sent from my iPhone

On 27 Dec 2018, at 10:32, Jan van de Sandt <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi,

Last month Amazon extended their serverless runtime platform AWS Lambda with support for custom runtimes. I created a Pharo Lambda Runtime so now we can implement Lambda functions in Smalltalk and easily deploy them on the Lambda platform. Lamba has quite a large "free-tier", more than enough to do some experiments and to host small applications for free.

See the GitHub project for more details https://github.com/jvdsandt/pharo-aws-toolbox

Cheers,

Jan.

Hi Tim,

On Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 4:49 PM Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works> wrote:

Hi Jan - reading through your docs, this looks very promising as I hadn’t got as far as using the api gateway - I was just connecting to the internal Alexa service.

One thing I didn’t quite understand - you mention specifying a HANDLER as an env variable, but your example description doesn’t seem to show where that is set? Is it in the bootstrap file (also is that bootrap.sh or just simply bootstrap?

Up til now I have configured my Lambda functions mostly via the AWS Console. When you create your function you must upload your code, specify the type of runtime and give the name of the handler. For a Java runtime this is the name of the main class, so for the Smalltalk implementation I choose something similar. If you want you can leave this item empty or set it to "Provided" and just hardcode the startup class in the image or in the bootstrap file. 

And are there any file attributes to set on that file?). It strikes me that rather than using an env variable - why don’t you specify the handler class when you invoke the image as the last command line option? (That is what I did in my example - or is it faster to query an env variable? Personally I find it easier to see it more explicitly on the command line).

I also notice you include NeoJson - did you need that? I found that the default Ston reader was more than adequate for reading the json  that was sent over (and so it’s one less pre-req).

With NeoJSON you can create mappings to serialize/deserialize custom Smalltalk classes to Json. I use this functionality in the CloudWatch-Logs interface to handle the request and response objects. I don't think this is possible with STON.

 

I haven’t yet fully understood the runtime layer - is this simply a zip file with the vm + files and without the image? Previously I had to add all of that in the zip I uploaded for each function, but this sounds like it simplifies things a lot. Do you have a script you used to create that - I ask as I found that trimming down the size of that made a difference to load times for Alexa (eg there are lots of sound and graphics dll’s you can remove - which I have in my script, and possibly, I could add to what you have done).

Yes, the layers are a great new feature. My layer just includes a standard Pharo 64 bits VM without any additions or removals. I made this one by hand, a script would be a better idea! You can remove shared libraries that you don't need. I think the most important thing is that the image does not load/initialize any unnecessary libraries. 

Equally, I also figured out the command line fu for uploading and registering your Lamba so it works in a ci - this might also be worthy of inclusion.

Yes, a CI job that can build a 'deployment' image and that can upload this image to AWS Lambda would be a great feature!

 

Anyway, l’ll Give it a go and see how the results compare - it was surprisingly fast using the js shim - but this seems like a much better solution.

Thanks for sharing - it’s an executing world.

Tim

Thanks for your comments!

Jan.

 

Sent from my iPhone

On Fri, 28 Dec 2018, at 11:35 AM, Jan van de Sandt wrote:

Hi Tim,

Yes, I read that you got Pharo working via the Javascript runtime. It should now be much easier and faster.

I still have to figure out the best way to create a deployment image. With the new bootstrap/modular setup of Pharo 7 it should be possible to create a lean-and-mean runtime image that can run in the cheapest 128MB max. ram configuration.

Jan.

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 2:18 PM Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]> wrote:

Cool - I was using a JS shim and had asked AWS many times why they couldn’t open it up wider... 

Now I’m back from my travels I’ll reincarnate my previous work and see how it works with this. I was looking forward to doing more with Lambda, so this is great timing.

 Tim

Sent from my iPhone

On 27 Dec 2018, at 10:32, Jan van de Sandt <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi,

Last month Amazon extended their serverless runtime platform AWS Lambda with support for custom runtimes. I created a Pharo Lambda Runtime so now we can implement Lambda functions in Smalltalk and easily deploy them on the Lambda platform. Lamba has quite a large "free-tier", more than enough to do some experiments and to host small applications for free.

See the GitHub project for more details https://github.com/jvdsandt/pharo-aws-toolbox

Cheers,

Jan.