Installation on AWS Lambda

[fergiemcdowall]

Has anybody attempted to install leveldown on AWS Lambda? If so how did it go? What is the best strategy for installing the binary?

[bhurlow]

Does lambda preserve the disk state between invocation? I would imagine Amazon rotates the location of the functions pretty heavily in the background so they're probably 'stateless'

[fergiemcdowall]

For my use case it is fine if the instances are ephemeral.

I guess another way to formulate the question is: is there a standard way compile and distribute prebuilt binaries for node modules so that you can deploy bundles without npm installing?

[bhurlow]

http://apex.run/#function-hooks might be helpful

[juliangruber]

leveldown is installed via prebuilt already, so an npm install on aws should just fetch those

[vweevers]

I guess another way to formulate the question is: is there a standard way compile and distribute prebuilt binaries for node modules so that you can deploy bundles without npm installing?

We're looking into prebuildify (#482), which would include all prebuilts in the npm package, and therefore in the AWS deployment package.

Short of that, there is no standard way.

[LinusU]

@fergiemcdowall you can compile the module inside a docker instance that matches the AWS Lambda runtime, then simply include that in your zip file that you upload to Lamda. That's how I've solved native dependencies in scandium.

[fergiemcdowall]

@LinusU nice! I will give it a try.

[LinusU]

@fergiemcdowall here is the docker file, in JS though 😆, but should be easy to see what it does.

https://github.com/LinusU/scandium/blob/master/lib/dockerfile.js

[vweevers]

FROM amazonlinux:2017.03

Nice one! Didn't know they had docker images :)

[LinusU]

Yeah, it's nice! It's also pinned at 2017.03 since the Lambda documentation says that that is the version that they are running at the moment.