Running Scala on AWS Lambda as a native-image
summary
Case study of a year building AWS Lambdas with Scala 3, packaged via scala-cli, compiled to GraalVM native-image, and released as an open‑source custom lambda runtime. Shows a deployable GitHub template + Actions that builds a tiny zip/container, runs multiple handlers in one function, supports local testing, and emits structured JSON logs to CloudWatch. Reports cold starts are rare (~1% of invocations), warm calls run in single‑digit to low‑tens of milliseconds and logging can add tens of ms.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:58Key takeaways
- 4:43Why Scala for AWS Lambda
- 6:50Motivations for Lambda
- 9:21Technologies and tools
- 11:56How Lambda works
- 17:09Lambda pricing and performance
- 22:59JVM challenges on Lambda
- 24:49Solutions for cold starts
- 26:41Custom Scala Lambda runtime
- 29:50Local testing workflow
- 31:00Testing strategies
- 33:12Deployment on AWS
- 34:35Multiple handlers in Lambda
- 35:41Logging and debugging
- 37:10Performance metrics analysis
- 38:59Summary and GitHub demo
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