jschoch
I did a few experiments with running on lambda via exrm because I wanted to avoid writing .js as much as possible. Here is what I found.
- the invocation time is slow for 128MB ram, need to make sure you have enough ram since ram and CPU are proportional. 128MB execution time is ~ 2-4 seconds.
- permissions are tricky due to the .erlang.cookie and the deployment model. I was only able to get one piece working by setting it to
nocookie. You have to be aware that one user puts your files into the container, and your invocation user may be random. - exrm seems to nicely bundle up libs and dependencies for a basic app. No mucking around with LD_LIBRARY_PATH was needed.
- deploying less to /var/task (where your zipped files go by default) is the best way to manage permissions. You can’t change these files after they are deployed to this root, but you can deploy a dir with 777 permissions and then chmod it later.
- you have to set a HOME env var for each possilbe invoker or erlang will complain. This where .erlang.cookie ends up living and you never know who will invoke. Since erlang.cookie needs something like permistions of 700 or 500 your processes will crash with file access problems.
wondering if others are interested in this
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ccverak
Any news about this?
jschoch
I have a prototype up here: GitHub - jschoch/exlam: elixir in AWS scaffold · GitHub
I’m working on another project to test it with and hope to make some improvements after I get something else working.
kristianmandrup
I don’t see Erlang mentioned as a supported language on AWS lambda docs page. Please explain!
What is the workaround or is Erlang now supported!?
mkunikow
First I am not convinced that elixir/erlang is good for short running process which aws lamda is.
There are many workarounds to run not supported languages:
You can pack elixir in docker container
http://maltmurphy.com/2015-05-17-lambda-ecs-batch.html
You can run any executable
I think Go language uses NodeJS Wrapper hack
http://apex.run/
jschoch
Can you elaborate on the downsides? What makes elixir not well suited for lambda? If you boot the erlang VM in the node.js module initialization it is plenty fast and you can avoid the VM boot tax. I can get < 10ms response times with my prototype.
The upsides are that you can use elixir’s great syntax, and you don’t have to pay for a server waiting around for stuff to do for spiky workloads or very low transaction rates. the HA of Lambda is a big win not to mention avoiding all the hassle of updating/patching another set of server’s operating systems.
mkunikow
Yes I mean you need to spin up elrang VM. Ok but if boot the erlang VM in the node.js module initialization works fast …
mkunikow
Host AWS lamda by your self
mkunikow
bzhr
It would be cool to have Elixir working on Lambda because of cost saving, but the high available nature of Erlang does not make it best fit for this architecture.
gmolto
We recently released the open-source SCAR framework that can run containers out of Docker images on AWS Lambda. We have included an use case to run Elixir code in AWS Lambda, just as a proof of concept of supporting programming languages (and runtime environments) other than those officially supported by AWS Lambda. Just in case you may be interested.