A presentation about my findings while tinkering with possibility of developing serverless microservices using Rust. Presented at Rust Meetup in Mozilla Indonesia, 8 September 2018.

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Adityo Pratomo
Mozilla Indonesia Rust
Meetup

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About Me
• CTO at Labtek Indie
• Technically, generalist
• Host of Rabu Rust
• Current interest: Kubernetes,
Microservice, Serverless, PWA and
Street Fighter V

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Microservice
• An architecture pattern that divides
monolithic application into several
different services
• Each service is responsible for a smaller
amount context
• Each one is independent and can be
invoked separately also, required to
communicate between services
• In practice, each service is deployed in
different server and has its own
database and communication interface
Quick In tro ductio n
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

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Serverless Application
• A server logic part of the application,
deployed inside a fully managed server,
normally in cloud -> BaaS (Backend as a
Service)
• A server logic part of the application,
deployed as an independent function that
can live only as long as it is being invoked
-> FaaS (Function as a Service)
• In both cases, application can be scaled
automatically, according to usage
• This frees up developer to fully
concentrate on developing application,
and not managing server
Some alternative definitions
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Some Serverless Solutions
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Serverless Solutions
• The aforementioned serverless solutions
are offered as a cloud-based
infrastructure offering
• Each has its own rule of what
environment they provide, what
languages they support and so forth
• Mostly accepted languages are:
• NodeJS
• Python
• Go
• PHP
Rule of the platform
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How to get Rust
into Serverless
Platform?
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2 Main Solutions
embed into
Dockerize binary

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From Rust to Node in AWS Lambda
Function Handler
(NodeJS)
AWS API Gateway
Actual Function
(Rust)
• Implemented using Neon, a Rust crate that allows creation of
native Node modules from Rust code
• The Node code which implements the function handler, will call
this native module
• The Node code is called as usual JS script from the project root
(node .)
• Note that in order for Lambda function to work,it require a
function handler in Node

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From Rust to Node in AWS Lambda
// native/src/lib.rs
#[macro_use]
extern crate neon;
extern crate postgres;
use postgres::{Connection, TlsMode};
use neon::prelude::*;
fn hello(mut cx: FunctionContext) -> JsResult<JsString> {
Ok(cx.string("hello from Rust"))
}
register_module!(mut cx, {
cx.export_function("hello", hello)
});
// lib/index.js
const native = require('../native’);
exports.handler = (event, context, callback) =>
callback(null, native.hello());

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Deploy Rust Binary Inside Docker Container for Now Deployment
• Compile Rust into binary that fits Now’s requirement
• The easiest way is to build upon Now example and just deploy from that
• Deploy into Now network using the command now
• The serverless application will then live as an HTTP-based endpoint, ready to be used anytime
Rust binary Dockerized Now network

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Demo
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Reflection
Rust can be used to develop
serverless microservice with fast
response. However, it’s not yet
primed for production in leading
serverless platform. Docker-based
microservice is the most exciting
option for the time being

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THANK YOU
A D I T YO P R ATO M O
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