Deploying and running services on Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) compute platforms like AWS Lambda has some compelling benefits for appropriate use-cases (short running workloads), including true (low-latency) elastic scalability, at finer granularity, with significant cost-savings based on scaling to zero.
At the same time, the Spring application framework (and more recently Spring Boot) has long encouraged and helped accelerate building modern, flexible enterprise apps that run on the JVM, that are easy to test, by abstracting away generic code (‘plumbing’) for integrating an app with its libraries and APIs; using familiar design/programming patterns (IoC/DI, proxies, Template methods etc); and providing valuable features (declarative transaction management, environment specific config, etc).
In an ideal world we’d use all these technologies – building Java/JVM functions with the help of Spring that are deployed and run on AWS Lambda – to realise their combined benefits.
But can these technologies be made to work together effectively? Or do we need to accept that when it comes to designing and building services to run on FaaS platforms like AWS Lambda, tech stacks (programming languages and application framework) offer than Java and Spring may offer a better solution?
Neil Brown 