Running Racket on AWS Lambda

I started to use AWS for some projects recently. But I only use few of their services. From time to time I look into some of there services and wonder if they are useful for my tasks. I looked into AWS Lambda, "… a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources for you, making it easy to build applications that respond quickly to new information." Nowadays these “lambda functions” could be written in NodeJS or Java. When I was looking for a roadmap of the supported languages I found an interesting blog post by Ruben Fonseca. He explaind how to run Go code on AWS Lambda.

I tried the same with Racket and wrote a short Racket programm test.rkt:

#lang racket/base

(display (format "Hello from Racket, args: ~a~%" (current-command-line-arguments)))

Then I used raco to create a binary test:

raco exe --orig-exe test.rkt

I took the NodeJS wrapper from Ruben’s blog post and put it in a file main.js:

var child_process = require('child_process');

exports.handler = function(event, context) {
  var proc = child_process.spawn('./test', [ JSON.stringify(event) ], { stdio: 'inherit' });

  proc.on('close', function(code) {
    if(code !== 0) {
      return context.done(new Error("Process exited with non-zero status code"));
    }

    context.done(null);
  });
}

Then I put both files in a zip archive, created a new AWS Lambda function, uploaded the zip file and invoked the function:

Invocation of AWS Lambda function

Fine!

PS: Only question is: When is AWS Lambda coming to the region eu-central-1, located in Frankfurt?

Upate (2016–03–15): AWS Lambda is now available in the EU (Frankfurt) region!