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Rust on AWS LambdaAWS

Found at: sdf.org:70/users/julienxx/Log/2015/rust_lambda.txt

Rust on AWS Lambda
==================

		

		
AWS Lambda[0] is an amazing event-based compute service capable of
running a function without worrying about the underlying
infrastructure. Currently it supports Node.js, Java (and JVM based
langs) & Python. It's a brilliant tool for micro-services.

		
In this article I'll show you how to run some Rust code on AWS Lambda
even if Rust is not officially supported.

		

		
Our micro-service
-----------------

		
We will create a simple service that will determine if a string is a
valid email address.

		
Let's start a new cargo project:

		
    $ cargo new email-checker --bin

		
We will need the regex crate. In Cargo.toml:

		
    [dependencies]
    regex = "0.1.41"

		
Then our service implementation in src/main.rs:

		
    extern crate regex;
    use regex::Regex;
    use std::env;

		
    fn main() {
        println!("Starting email-checker...");

		
        // Create an email regular expression
        let re = Regex::new(r"^\w+([-+.']\w+)*@\w+([-.]\w+)*\.\w+([-.]\w+)*$").unwrap();

		
        // Match the first argument against the regular expression
        match env::args().nth(1) {
            // We have an argument
            Some(email) => {
                if re.is_match(&email) {
                    println!("{} is a valid email.", email);
                } else {
                    println!("{} is NOT a valid email.", email);
                }
            }
            // No argument provided
            None => {
                println!("Please provide a string to test.");
                return;
            }
        };
    };

		

		
Generate a Rust binary
----------------------

		
My machine is running OS X, AWS Lambda runs Linux. I tried to
cross-compile a Linux binary on Darwin but that was too much of a
hassle. In order to get the same environment as my lambda function
will run on, I simply created an EC2 t2.micro instance to compile my
code.

		
Create an Amazon Linux EC2 instance, ssh onto it and run:

		
    $ sudo yum install git
    $ sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

		
to get a working development environment. Then clone your
email-checker repo and run:

		
    $ cargo build --release
    $ cp target/release/email-checker ./email-checker-linux

		
We now have a working Linux binary w00t! Commit and push the binary to
your repo, you can terminate the instance.

		

		
The Node.js wrapper
-------------------

		
Since Rust is not supported by AWS Lambda, we will write a simple
Javascript module that will spawn a child process with our Rust
binary. That's the main trick of this article :). Note that we could
ship a Haskell, Go, OCaml or whatever binary the same way.

		
Let's create a main.js at the root of our project:

		
    var child_process = require('child_process');

		
    exports.handler = function(event, context) {
        // event is the JSON we provide to our lambda function. More on this later.
        console.log(event["email"]);

		
        // spawn a child process with our email-checker-linux binary and the event["email"] value for our argument.
        var proc = child_process.spawn('./email-checker-linux', [ event["email"] ], { stdio: 'inherit' });

		
        proc.on('close', function(code) {
            if(code !== 0) {
                return context.done(new Error("Process exited with non-zero status code"));
            }

		
            context.done(null);
        });
    }

		

		
Packaging our service
---------------------

		
In order to upload our code to AWS lambda, we just have to create a
zip file containing our main.js and our email-checker-linux binary.

		

		
Creating a lambda function
--------------------------

		
Log in to the AWS console, click on Lambda in the Compute section and
click Get started now.  We are then shown a list of lambda functions
blueprints. We will not use a blueprint for our example so click Skip.
Next we need to configure our lambda function.

		
Fill in the name of the function, its description and choose the
Node.js runtime.

		
In the "Lambda function code" section, choose "Upload a .ZIP file" and
upload the file we created previously.

		
In "Lambda function handler and role", use main.handler for the
handler and choose the "Basic execution role". This will open a popup
prompting you to create a new "IAM Role", just allow with the default
settings.

		
Back on our function setup, leave the Advanced settings as is and
click Next.

		
Finally, we can review and create the function. Congratulations you
created your first AWS Lambda function.

		

		
Testing our lambda function
---------------------------

		
On the lambda function screen click Actions then "Configure test
event". Here we can write some JSON that will be received by our
Node.js handler as the event parameter.

		
    {
      "email": "karl@marx.com"
    }

		
Click "Save and test". This will execute our lambda function. If you
click Monitoring, you can see that we ran our function once.

		
To view the result, click "View logs in CloudWatch". We're presented
with a list of log lines.

		
Click the first line and boom karl@marx.com is indeed a valid email.

		

		
What can we do from here?
-------------------------

		
Our email checking micro-service is still lacking an interface, we
could use Amazon API gateway[](https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/) to
create a simple endpoint where we could POST the string we want to
check and return a proper response for example.

		
That's it! We successfully ran some Rust code on AWS Lambda. Have fun
Rustaceans :)

		
You can find the full code and the Linux binary here[1].

		

		
[0] http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/
[1] https://github.com/julienXX/email-checker

		
-------

		
Last update: 17 November, 2015

		


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