We have been discussing going to a more serverless architecture at work and so I decided that I should do some research to see where that stuff is now. When I was at Choose we used AWS Lambda to implement the backend of an abandoned shopping cart service. We would then use that data to drive an email campaign to encourage the users to come back and finish purchasing an energy plan. It had a huge effect in driving conversion rates and we were able to implement the service in about 25 lines of vanilla java code. I opted not to use Spring as I judged the startup times to be too slow for it to be worth it. To manage libraries we used the maven shade plugin in our build process to build a fat jar.

Recently at work I worked on a project using Amazon AWS Lambda. This is a cool concept. Amazon calls it serverless computing, but really what it is, is abstracting the server so that you can just focus on a small task that needs to run.

In this case we had a rest endpoint that just stores some data in a database.  If we think about a traditional Spring Boot Microservice we would probably do Spring Data JPA, point it at a mysql DB, and then have some rest controllers that talk to a service tier which persists the data. With Spring Boot this isn’t much code, but you still have some embedded Tomcat Server and a fair amount of ceremony for doing something very simple. After building the app you will need to deploy it to Elastic Beanstalk instance or else an EC2 Nano Instance or something similar. That is a lot of DevOps overhead to do something very simple. With Lamdba we can create a simple class that takes a pojo java object (Jackson style). With Lambda you don’t have Hibernate, you are just dealing with raw JDBC but when you are just inserting 1 Row into a Database you don’t really need am object relational mapping. You then use Amazon’s API gateway to send any requests to an endpoint to the lambda function and you are all good to go.