Good morning everyone and happy MonDEV ☕
Christmas is just over a week away and our Monday coffee is starting to taste more like hot chocolate, and the Christmas lights far exceed those of the LEDs at our workstations...maybe! 🤩
If it's not already obvious, I'm a lover of the Christmas period and I wanted to share some of this joy with you, hoping that you also enjoy this time of year in the same way!
What are we talking about today? Today I won't talk about a specific tool; I will briefly talk about the Serverless day, in which I participated last Thursday and Friday! Why "briefly", while usually I do a detailed summary? Because this time I was in an "exploratory" phase; the serverless world has always intrigued me but it is not within my current skills nor have I ever worked with it, so I took the opportunity to get an idea and find a starting point to explore this world. ☁️
Could I have done this by searching online?
Maybe, but meeting other developers, hearing about it, and participating in workshops is much more motivating and functional for me!
So I don't have the skills to make a complete summary of all that I saw and heard, but I want to tell you a bit about what I took away from these two days and why I came out excited and curious to delve deeper!
The first day was dedicated to a workshop held by Luciano Mammino, on how to write optimized lambdas using Rust. This gave me the opportunity to work with the crab language in a new way and approach the use of lambdas, the serverless functions of AWS. 🦀
The whole workshop was extremely interesting and starting from scratch, we managed to deploy more than one function with increasingly incremental functionalities. The advantages of writing these functions with a language like Rust are many, thanks to the lightweight final artifact and the minimal memory utilized even at runtime! In a situation like that of lambdas where a greater execution time and memory needed correspond to a higher economic cost, these types of optimizations become critical.
To develop these projects we used Cargo Lambda a library that provides a boilerplate for writing your lambdas in Rust and, once ready, allows you to deploy them directly from the terminal.
However, since the functions deployed with Cargo Lambda are separate units from the rest and would then need to be connected by hand, which is not ideal, we also worked with SAM also having (for me) a first approach to infrastructure as code, which really excited me. We then defined a schema to deploy and orchestrate the lambda together directly in our project, to then release it on AWS having everything connected.
I came out of the first day full of ideas and curiosity, a feeling then reinforced by the second day where I was able to get various insights into the serverless world and realize how much of an opportunity it can be for us developers to further explore this aspect, which undoubtedly requires a more vertical competence, paying attention not only to the code but also to the economic aspect related to its execution (number and execution time as well as memory used can be critical factors) and to the architecture. As an approach, it certainly requires the developer to have a broader perspective to see how to best orchestrate everything as a whole, but it also provides greater flexibility and agility in deploying a solution!
I approached these two days with curiosity and a desire to explore; I definitely came out enriched and also curious to take a few steps in this world, perhaps returning next year with some more knowledge and skills!
How many of you are already working in the serverless field or would be curious to try it out?
Let me know!
Articles of the week
Spin up WebAssembly on DigitalOcean in Minutes talking about Rust and cloud, have you ever tried deploying a WASM component? In this article, you will find a brief guide on how to create an application with Rust, compile it into WASM, and make it available on a DigitalOcean Droplet!
Lambda Cold Starts benchmark staying on topic, one of the resources shared during the workshop showing the cold start performance of various languages! You'll see that Rust always ranks among the top in terms of performance!
For this week, I think that's all, I hope I've given you some interesting insights! With that said, I just have to wish you a good week
Happy Coding 0_1
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