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.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.