We have been discussing going to a more serverless architecture at work and so I decided that I should do some research to see where that stuff is now. When I was at Choose we used AWS Lambda to implement the backend of an abandoned shopping cart service. We would then use that data to drive an email campaign to encourage the users to come back and finish purchasing an energy plan. It had a huge effect in driving conversion rates and we were able to implement the service in about 25 lines of vanilla java code. I opted not to use Spring as I judged the startup times to be too slow for it to be worth it. To manage libraries we used the maven shade plugin in our build process to build a fat jar.

In my current role we will deploy on AWS lambda as well. One thing I am looking for in considering serverless frameworks is what allows the developer to have a very nice flow as well, as back when we did the abandoned cart service debugging was a painful experience. At that point I think we did a bunch of console logging messages to figure it out. That won’t scale up for a development team that is going heavy into serverless it is too inefficient.

Then last week I came across this Spring Tips video about a new project Project Riff. I am happy to see Pivotal getting into this space as they build great frameworks and tools. And Riff seems no different it allows a developer to easily install it on their laptop and seems like it has first class support for Google Cloud and anyone’s infrastructure that is already running Kubernetes.

So I really liked the Riff part of that video. But then I was watching the Spring Cloud Function part. Now everyone who knows me knows that I love the Spring framework. I have been using it since 2008, and I think in terms of what it can do for you on Java server apps there is nothing else close. It really accelerates developer productivity and lets them focus on solving business problems. But as I watched this video I was sort of like I don’t get it. Like year I get that people want to use Spring in serverless, but when you watch it take 5 seconds to stand up a function, to me that is a deal breaker. It is too slow and if you are being charged by the second for your service paying 5 seconds to execute a function that will take less than a second is too expensive.

I was pretty much ready to write Spring Cloud Function off as a bad idea based on that then I saw something on Twitter about Dave Syer demoing something at Spring IO this week which brings massively faster startup times. I suspect it has something to do with the spring-context-indexer that Juergen talks about in this video, but I have been unable to find any examples or documentation on how to use it.

The other thing I need to take a look at is the AWS SAM Local tool. The big pain point I had doing Lamda’s a couple of years ago was around debugging them. This looks like it may solve that problem for us by giving us an convenient way to hook this into our development lifecycle.