Today’s guest post is from Mikhail Shilkov, a Microsoft Azure MVP and early Pulumi user and contributor - enjoy!
Serverless compute services, like Azure Functions, offer an amazing power to application developers to leverage: highly available, automatically scaled, low-ceremony, pay-per-value functions created in several lines of code.
Creating serverless applications just got even easier! You can now protect your application APIs in just three easy steps. We’ve already posted about how easy it is to create serverless apps in Pulumi. Now, we’re helping you simplify protecting those apps with API Gateway and Lambda authorizers.
With Pulumi’s new AWSX package, you can quickly define a Lambda and an AWS Lambda authorizer to protect it. We’re once again harnessing the power of Lambdas as Lambdas to allow developers to focus on writing code.
Today, we will walkthrough creating a simple serverless app using AWS and Pulumi. We will simplify implementing the OAuth protocol by using Auth0 and AWS Lambda authorizers to authorize users. Auth0 provides a universal authentication and authorization platform for applications. It has become an extremely popular platform for user management because Auth0 makes OAuth easy.
Pulumi lets you create, deploy, and manage Google Cloud applications and infrastructure in familiar languages like JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python, and without needing to learn new DSLs or YAML templating solutions. This means great productivity and getting to use tools you already know and love. Since serverless is all about focusing more on your application code, and less on infrastructure and configuration toil, we absolutely love Google Functions.
Google Cloud is one of the most exciting cloud platforms available today, with a breadth of powerful infrastructure services from Google Container Engine (GKE) and Google Cloud Functions to Cloud Firestore and Cloud Spanner.
Pulumi is the most productive tooling available today for teams building cloud applications and infrastructure, in your favorite languages. Add them together, and teams can easily take maximum advantage of Google Cloud Platform’s rich features, productively, with a combined platform that makes it easy to collaborate, share, and reuse.
Across the industry, the popularity of Python is exploding. Amongst our own customers at Pulumi, who automate their infrastructure using Python, we’ve seen the same. Stack Overflow wrote about the astounding growth of Python:
The term “fastest-growing” can be hard to define precisely, but we make the case that Python has a solid claim to being the fastest-growing major programming language.
Since Python is not a new language, what could be driving this incredible adoption curve?
With Pulumi, you can create, deploy, and manage any cloud resource using your favorite language. This includes application and infrastructure related resources, often in the same program.
One area this gets really fun is serverless computing. Because we’re using general purpose languages, we can create resources, and then wire up event handlers, just like normal event-driven programming. This is the way serverless architecture should be!
In this article, we’ll see how. There’s a broad range of options depending on what you want to do, and how your team likes to operate. We’ll be using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and TypeScript, but other clouds and languages are available.
One of Pulumi’s goals is to provide the simplest way possible to do serverless programming on AWS by enabling you to create cloud infrastructure with familiar programming languages that you are already using today. We believe that the existing constructs already present in these languages, like flow control, inheritance, composition, and so on, provide the right abstractions to effectively build up infrastructure in a simple and familiar way.
In a previous post we focused on how Pulumi could allow you to simply create an AWS Lambda out of your own JavaScript function. While this was much easier than having to manually create a Lambda Deployment Package yourself, it could still be overly complex to integrate these Lambdas into complete serverless application.
Pulumi makes it incredibly easy to use serverless functions within your cloud infrastructure and applications - an AWS Lambda is as simple as writing a JavaScript lambda!
const bucket = new aws.s3.Bucket("my-bucket");
bucket.onObjectCreated("onNewObject", async (ev) => console.log(ev));
By making it so easy to introduce serverless functions into cloud infrastructure, Pulumi programs often incorporate many Lambdas, all wired together as part of a larger set of infrastructure and application code.
Pulumi’s approach to infrastructure as code uses familiar languages instead of YAML or DSLs. One major advantage of this approach is that AWS Lambdas, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, et al. can just be real lambdas in your favorite language, offering a flexible and simple path to serverless. Such functions behave as normal functions, allowing you to treat serverless code as part of your application instead of separate “infrastructure” that needs to be configured, managed, and versioned manually. In this post, we’ll examine this capability in JavaScript, which is already very function- and callback-oriented, making serverless feel like a natural extension of the language we already know and love.
While Functions as a Service (FaaS) systems have become more popular, getting up and running can still feel overly complex compared to normal application development. FaaS offerings today divide the development experience between “infrastructure” – doing all the work to configure the Lambda runtime itself (i.e. how much memory to use, what environment variables should be present, etc.) – and writing and maintaining the code that will execute in the function itself when triggered. Most developers just want to focus on the latter, write some code, and have it work.
The newly introduced cloud.HttpServer in Pulumi makes it easy to serve a standard Node.js HTTP server as a serverless API on any cloud platform. This new API brings together the flexibility and rich ecosystem of Node.js HTTP servers, the cost and operational simplicity of serverless APIs, and the multi-cloud authoring and deployment of Pulumi. In this post, we walk through some of the background on why we introduced this new API and how it fits into the Node.js HTTP ecosystem.