Cloud native data ingestion with BoxLang on AWS Lambda
BoxLang offers a starter project to build your business into Lambda's: functions that process a single invocation with data and run inside the AWS infrastructure without having a server, webserver or even being accessible over HTTP. Just a function that runs and then stops, with all the logic about when, where and how to run handled by AWS.
The starter project offers a complete development experience: the runtime, a test setup, deployment scripts etc. It makes it easy to develop your business logic without having to worry too much about the AWS environment it is going to be deployed eventually.
Using BoxLang this way opens the door to using many more AWS services in a 'cloud native' way. You no longer have to run BoxLang in a VMs /container, with a web server, accessible over HTTP and always on like you would do on-premise, you can use BoxLang Lambdas to stitch together individual services for database, storage, messaging, workflows, compute etc. and compose a 'cloud native' application that leverages the strengths of these services without the overhead of what you don't need.
We built a small cloud native application on AWS to ingest data that is uploaded through CSV files, processed through an event based system, enriched with data from external systems, stored in a database and then summarised and exported through an API. This application uses many cloud native services: S3 for file storage, SQS for event queuing, API gateway to expose endpoints, Secrets Manager to store API keys, DynamoDB as a no-sql database, EventBridge for scheduling etc. What it does not use is a webserver or anything else that is constantly running. All pieces are built with BoxLang Lambdas that start on demand and stop when the data is processed.
Jochem van Dieten
