Amazon has given the green light to AWS Lambda Extensions, which enable developers to integrate the cloud giant’s serverless compute Lambda functions environment with common tools for monitoring, observability, security, and governance.

Lambda extensions were announced in preview form last year, but are now deemed ready for production purposes. According to AWS, they can be used for capturing diagnostic information; fetching configuration settings or secrets before the function invocation; detecting and alerting on function activity through security agents; or sending telemetry to custom destinations such as Amazon S3 buckets.

As part of the release version, AWS said it has now enabled functions to send responses as soon as the function code is complete, without waiting for the included extensions to finish. This enables extensions to perform activities such as sending telemetry to a preferred destination once the function’s response has been returned.

AWS Lambda extensions have been designed make it easier to link in tools that developers commonly use, without the need for complex installation or configuration management. Tools can be added to functions using Lambda layers, or included in the image for functions that are deployed as container images.

Users can install and manage extensions using the Lambda console, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or infrastructure as code services such as AWS CloudFormation.

The Lambda extensions use a special Extensions API to register for function and execution environment lifecycle events, in response to which they can start new processes or run logic. Lambda extensions can also use the Runtime Logs API to subscribe to a stream of the same logs that the Lambda service sends to Amazon CloudWatch directly from the Lambda execution environment. The API also enables users to create their own custom Lambda extensions, if required.

A list of the partners that have made extensions available for their tools is available on the AWS Blog, and currently includes AppDynamics, Datadog, HashiCorp, Splunk and Sumo Logic.