Amazon Cloud Broadens .NET Core Choices for AWS Lambda Functions -- Visual Studio Magazine

Amazon Cloud Broadens .NET Core Choices for AWS Lambda Functions

By David Ramel
03/20/2019

Microsoft-centric developers working with the Amazon cloud platform now have more .NET Core choices to handle their AWS Lambda functions for serverless, event-driven programming.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week released a new Amazon.Lambda.RuntimeSupport library to support the use of more .NET Core runtime options.

Previously, developers could only use Long Term Support (LTS) versions of .NET Core to handle AWS Lambda functions. LTS versions are supported by Microsoft for either three years after an initial release or for one year after a subsequent LTS version is released, whichever is longer.

After LTS, Microsoft has a Current release support designation, providing support for three months after a subsequent Current or LTS release.

And finally, Microsoft supports Preview releases if they carry a "Go-Live" designation, meaning they can be used in production.

Prior to the new support library, developers could only use LTS .NET Core versions built into the AWS Lambda service, of which the latest is .NET Core 2.1. Going forward, AWS Lambda will continue to build-in only LTS versions of .NET Core. However, coders can use the new support library to create Lambda functions using Current and Preview versions of .NET Core that are compatible with .NET Standard 2.0, which provides a specification representing a set of APIs that all .NET platforms must implement.

"If you're looking to use new features from .NET Core 2.2 or 3.0 preview, Amazon.Lambda.RuntimeSupport gives you a path forward," AWS said in a post.

That path may prove to be a bit more complicated, however, as programmers using those other .NET Core versions must create custom runtimes to leverage non-supported languages or runtimes.

While AWS will automatically apply periodic security updates and bug fixes to its built-in .NET Core runtimes, the company said: "The customer manages updates to custom runtimes, but has flexibility to bring any version of a runtime to the platform. Keep this in mind when choosing between a built-in runtime and a custom runtime."

AWS has been steadily increasing its .NET Core support, having introduced .NET Core 2.1 support for AWS Lambda in July of last year and integrating AWS Lambda with PowerShell Core 6.0 a couple months later.

Source code for the new library is available on GitHub, and it also comes in a NuGet package.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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