3 posts tagged with "serverless"

Integrating gRPC with AWS Lambda: Challenges and Solutions​

While gRPC is the gold standard for high-performance microservices, integrating it directly with AWS Lambda—a serverless, ephemeral computing service—presents fundamental architectural mismatches. Lambda is designed for short, stateless execution, whereas gRPC is optimized for persistent, long-lived connections over HTTP/2.

This article details the challenges of this integration and the primary methods developers use to make gRPC work in a serverless environment.

AWS Alternatives to gRPC: Serverless Communication Patterns​

When building an application on AWS, especially using Lambda and other serverless components, the landscape for inter-service communication shifts dramatically compared to traditional VM-based or containerized microservices where gRPC shines.

While gRPC is possible to use with AWS Lambda (via HTTP/2 support in API Gateway or Application Load Balancer), the complexity of managing the gRPC framework within the Lambda execution environment often makes it non-ideal.

The fundamental shift in AWS is moving from synchronous RPC (Remote Procedure Call) patterns to more flexible Asynchronous Event-Driven and Managed API patterns.

Processing media files inside AWS Lambda can be a challenge due to its resource limits, lack of a local disk, and timeouts. However, it’s entirely possible to stream files directly from S3 into FFmpeg, process them on the fly, and avoid writing anything to disk.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• Streaming files from S3 into Lambda
• Using ffmpeg with stdin and stdout in memory
• Avoiding /tmp bottlenecks
• Examples and production-ready patterns