Serverless Framework hits v1.45, starts listening to ALBs

Serverless Framework hits v1.45, starts listening to ALBs

The Serverless Framework team has updated the project to v1.45.0, adding a raft of features to make using AWS’ serverless services that little bit easier.

A blogpost by Philipp Müns, senior core developer at Serverless Inc, highlighted the addition of AWS’s recent addition of integration between application load balancers and Lambda functions, meaning an ALB can be used “as a gateway for incoming HTTP traffic which can then be forwarded to Lambda functions” instead of AWS’ API Gateway.

So, the Serverless Framework v1.45.0 introduces a new ALB event source which makes it easy to hook up a Lambda function with an ALB listener.

As Müns pointed out, it was the integration between Lambda and API Gateway that really kickstarted serverless computing. But, he continued, “The great news is that it’s usually an order of magnitude cheaper to use ALBs as API Gateways compared to the AWS API Gateway service.”

Sticking with API Gateway, Müns said v1.45.0 builds on earlier support for API Gateway REST API logs, adding support for API Gateway Websocket logs. This allows users to combine a REST API and Websocket API in a single service and enable logging for both.

The update also adds a config option to the Serverless CLI, to pass a custom configuration filename to be used for a given deploy or package command, which means users can pass individually crafted and specialised configuration files under different circumstances for the same service.

The latest version also delivers the ability to pull down deployment artifacts stored in an S3 bucket. “We kept the implementation agnostic, meaning that we can extend it to pull zip files from any remote location,” Müns wrote.

Müns also adds that “Due to the Node.js release cycle we’ve dropped support for Node.js version 4 which is no longer in LTS.” In future support for non LTS Node.js versions will be slowly phased out.