Serverless framework

The Serverless Framework has become the De Facto toolkit for building and deploying Serverless functions or applications. Its community has done a great job advancing the tools around Serverless architecture.

However, in the Serverless community there is debate among developers on whether a single AWS Lambda function should only be responsible for a single API endpoint. My answer, based on my real-world production experience, is NO.

Imagine if you are building a set of APIs with 10 endpoints and you need to deploy the APIs to DEV, STAGE and PROD environments. Now you are looking at 30 different functions to version, deploy and manage - not to mention the Copy & Paste code and configuration that will result from this type of set-up. NO THANKS!!!

I believe a more pragmatic approach is 1 Lambda Function == 1 Microservice.

For example, if you were building a User Microservice with basic CRUD functionality, you should implement CREATE, READ, UPDATE and DELETE in a single Lambda function. In the code, you should resolve the desired action by inspecting the request or the context.

Vert.x to the rescue

There are many benefits to using Vert.x in any application. With Vert.x, you get a rock-solid and lightweight toolkit for building reactive, highly performant, event-driven and non-blocking applications. The toolkit even provides asynchronous APIs for accessing traditional blocking drivers such as JDBC.

However, for this example, we will mainly focus on the Event Bus. The event bus allows different parts of your application to communicate with each other via event messages. It supports publish/subscribe, point to point, and request-response messaging.

For the User Microservice example above, we could treat the combination of the HTTP METHOD and RESOURCE PATH as a unique event channel, and register the subscribers/handlers to respond appropriately.

Let’s dive right in.

Goal

Create a reactive, message-driven, asynchronous User Microservice with GET, POST, DELETE, PUT CRUD operations in a single AWS Lambda Function using the Serverless Framework

Serverless stack definition:

Solution

Use Vert.x’s Event Bus to handle dynamic routing to event handlers based on HTTP method and resource path from the API input.

Lambda Handler:

Code review

Lines 14-19 initializes the Vert.x instance. AWS Lambda will hold on to this instance for the life of the container/JVM. It is reused in subsequent requests.

Line 17 registers the User Service handlers

Line 22 defines the main handler method that is called when the Lambda function is invoked.

Line 27 sends the Lambda function input to the (dynamic) address where handlers are waiting to respond.

Lines 44-66 defines the specific handlers and binds them to the appropriate channels (http method + resource path)

Summary

As you can see, Vert.x’s Event Bus makes it very easy to dynamically support multiple routes in a single Serverless function. This reduces the number of functions you have to manage, deploy and maintain in AWS. In addition, you gain access to asynchronous, non-blocking APIs that come standard with Vert.x.

Serverless + Vert.x = BLISS