AWS Lambda & Perl - The Journey Begins

Perl has been the odd man out as more modern programming languages take hold and gain the support of the software development community.  There is no doubt that Perl 5 has been left in the dust with regard to support from vendors of all kinds.  It is rare to see an API written for Perl for any of the cloud services.  It seems to be left up to the Perl community itself to provide support for many of these APIs.

A few weeks ago I released version 0.0.1 of a framework for creating AWS Lambdas in Perl.   It is a challenge to continue to develop in Perl and becomes more and more challenging as other languages continue to gain support, however I don't think the Perl community is giving up.  While I'm quite willing to learn Python and embrace new methods, I also see the need for supporting legacy environments with a large investment in Perl code.  I also enjoy a challenge. :-)


AWS Lambda began with support for Node.js and quickly added support for Java, Python, Ruby and Go.  It is unlikely to provide support for Perl, however, AWS announced the ability to use a custom Lambda runtime environment, published the Lambda runtime API and made it possible to write your own runtime in other languages (like Perl).   The challenges here are not few, but for those that find Perl a comfortable language and have an investment in a large base of Perl code, the effort may be justified.

Many of the challenges and potential solutions are already documented in the project's README however my thinking has been evolving about many of the initial ideas I had regarding building a serverless framework for Perl.

In the days and weeks ahead, I will be blogging about those aforementioned challenges and hopefully some of the solutions (the first post in this series can be found here). I am hopeful that there are some smarter people than me in the Perl community that will see this opportunity and contribute their expertise or at least their ideas in order to make Perl Lambdas a (better) reality.

The journey begins...