A very simple Framework to manage your Infrastructure as Code.
When working with AWS services, you’ve got several choices to build and deploy your lambda functions: Serverless Framework, AWS Amplify Framework, and AWS SAM CLI are the three most popular toolkit today. Each of them has different pros and cons. The cons you will get just happens after your project sized to be a complex solution beyond their pre-designed, intended purpose. In this article, I want to introduce yet another choice for your work with less locked-in, highly customization, and ultimate control of your Infrastructure as Code solution.
What is Simplify-SDK? This is a JavaScript SDK that helps your DevOp integration easier by adding deployment steps inline to your project solution. You will never want to be locked into any vendor for a tool you use. In FaaS architecture, a function can be very small but a project needs some (3–100) functions to orchestrate a workload. One CI/CD tool for all of them is quite hard to deploy your project when you just need to manage a stand-alone function.
According to this intention of purpose, Simplify-SDK is built for creating new infrastructure as AWS resources, managing Lambda functions and its configuration, monitoring them by writing your infrastructure management tool using your favourite JavaScript language with Node runtime. For a basic understanding of how to use this SDK, here is a “Hello World” example:
Given you have an existing Lambda function that was already deployed by a Serverless YML definition with the StackOutput parameters:
- Lambda Function Name:
— “YourLambdaFunction-1WDRZ5J5OUN5H” - Lambda Function Role ARN: — “arn:aws:iam::01234567890:role/YourLambdaExecutionRole”
Serverless organizes your code with a repo base concept with single Code Base, one Resource Stack and one Policy. Here is your project structure of a FaaS architecture organized within one repo:
There are two new files: config.json and deploy.js that do not belong to Serverless Framework and will be added in the next steps of this article.
After months of a project growing, you don’t want to update your function using serverless deploy function -f command. One of your reasons will be serverless uploads your function code using a single distribution package with all repo code. The other hand, it uses one single AWS Role Policy per repo for every function. Instead of that design, you want to design a function by your way; with extended management capability — for example; you must restrict your function resource access with an individual Role Policy, you want to minimize your function code just deploy a partial code what they need to overcome Cold Start bootstrap issue, or to extend the other security measures etc, those things are hard to be done by just using Serverless Framework.
To do so, Simplify-SDK which is distributed as a node package must be installed by using npm or yarn as your choice (use one of them):
- npm install simplify-sdk
- yarn add simplify-sdk
To give the framework knowing about your deployment environment, a generic configuration is created to declare what you intend to do with your function and other resources. Here is an example of config.json:
In this configuration, it allows you passing variables from your code or ENVIRONMENT variables (ex: process.env.VAR) into the brackets syntax placeholders — ${VAR} that was declared in config.json. The Function block of this file is the parameter input following the definition of AWS Lambda updateFunctionCode:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaScriptSDK/latest/AWS/Lambda.html#updateFunctionCode-property
Now, it’s time to write your infrastructure as NodeJS code:
You can find this example code at https://github.com/simplify-framework/simplify repository by README document.
Finally, to update your function code, just get into your function location and run this code:
cd functions/YourLambdaFunction && node deploy.js
Or adding this command line into your package.json:
Simplify-SDK supports these functions to manage AWS infrastructure such as creating your very complex CloudFormation stack, linking between serverless and another CloudFormation resource or managing AWS Resource Policy:
Checkout Simplify Framework for more than what you need!
Follows my articles:
Publishing a TensorFlow Model on AWS Lambda to make a sell-able API
DIY — Build Yourself a Serverless Framework with 152 Lines of Code
The On-Demand Wakeup Pattern to Overcome AWS Lambda Cold Start
