AWS Lambda with Python

Update

The bundle of this code is interesting but the bundle is huge! I recommend trying out either of the solutions below.

• Serverless Framework
• AWS Serverless Application Model

Intro

AWS Lambda is a hosted platform for running code in the Amazon ecosystem. It supports multiple runtimes including Python! I found that although writing the logic code is easy, there are some unintuitive things that I’ve stumbled over.

There are three ways you can get your code to Amazon lambda.

• their inline editor
• S3://Bucket
• Zipped up

The below repo has a preconfigured way to clone a repo, and demonstrate adding packages to run on AWS Lambda quickly.

• 1. Setup an AWS Account and CLI on your machine
• 2. Provision an AWS Lambda with role AWSLambdaFullAccess
• 3. Create your function with a unique name from the interface

Use the starting point of https://github.com/4projects/python-lambda-template and update App.py

UPDATE CODE

zip -g App.zip *.py
aws lambda update-function-code --function-name $FUNCTION_NAME --zip-file fileb://App.zip

Note Also update your app handler from Main.handler to something like App.handler.

Detailed Writeup

What the application example does in App.py does is visits a website, copies down the data (presuming its json) and inserts it in DynamoDB. The DynamoDB was also created ahead of time through the AWS interface and an example of this can be used for any json feed.

Building the bundle

This is how the bundle was built and can be rebuilt. Additional packages can be added in it.

Packaging and uploading your bundle

You need to package third-party dependencies. The least painful way is to set up a virtualenv. pyenv comes packaged with python3 so after you create a new directory you can do that with:

mkdir APP_NAME && cd APP_NAME
python3 -m venv .

Then you have to activate your virtual environment. Depending on your terminal pick the appropriate extension.To activate your virtual environment you would use bin/activate. If you’re using fish shell, you can use bin/activate.fish.

after your APP_NAME directory should look like:

ls . 
> bin        include    lib        pyvenv.cfg

Now install packages to your heart’s content. creating a few dependencies or common libs you rely on is wise.

pip install requests

Then changing directory to the site-packages in your lib folder. My directory path happens to be $VIRTUAL_ENV/lib/python3.6/site-packages.

Zip it up zip -r9 App.zip $VIRTUAL_ENV/lib/python3.6/site-packages.