Aws Lambda Visual Studio Debug
Aws Lambda Visual Studio 2017
Aws Lambda Template Visual Studio

The AWS Lambda Deployment adds a task to easily enable build or release pipelines in VSTS to work with AWS Lambda Functions. It is free and open source plugin!

The task include a new service endpoint type AWS, to supply AWS credentials to the tasks at runtime (If you have the AWS Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) plugin installed, you can use the already configured endpoints).

Highlighted Features

Create an AWS Credentials Connection

To work with AWS Lambda services an AWS subscription has to be linked to Visual Studio Team Services using the Services tab in the Account Administration section. Add the AWS subscription to use in the Build or Release Management definition by opening the Account Administration screen (gear icon on the top-right of the screen) and then click on the Services Tab.

The goal is to be able to open a.NET Core Lambda project in Visual Studio and just push F5 to start debugging without any dependencies other than the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio. When a project is opened in Visual Studio the toolkit will detect the project is a Lambda project by looking for the Lambda. So mostly for entertainment sake and to see how easy it would be, I wondered if I could create a Python-based lambda in AWS using GitHub and Visual Studio Online. So, let's see how this goes and how long it takes. AWS Lambda is a service that confuses many people.For that reason, you may be wondering just how it works, and how you’d use it to build a highly scalable event-driven application. Open your Visual Studio and follow the steps to create new project. Click on File - New - Project. Step 2 Now, the following screen is displayed wherein you select AWS Lambda for Visual C#. Learn more about AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code at – AM Grobelny and Nicki Klein demonstrate how to leverage the AWS Toolkit for.

Select the AWS endpoint type and provide the following paramters

A name used to refer to the credentials when configuring tasks that require AWS credentials (Like)
AWS Access Key ID
AWS Secret Access Key

The AWS Lambda subscription needs some extra grant to use all features of plugin

IAM:
- iam:PassRole
VPC:
- ec2:CreateNetworkInterface
- ec2:DescribeNetworkInterfaces
- ec2:DeleteNetworkInterface

Please refer to About Access Keys. Note that we strongly suggest the use of access and secret keys generated for an Identity and Access Management (IAM) user account.

Deploy Serveless Applications

Create or update a Lambda Function. This mode only modifies the last version of the function ($LATEST). You can set an alias to invoke this version.

Publish a Version

Publish a new version of the Lambda Function, based on the state of the latest version ($LATEST). You can set an alias to invoke this version.

Please refer to Lambda Versioning and Aliases for more information.

Reporting issues

Aws Lambda Visual Studio Debug

Check out the Github issues directly.

Minimum supported environments

Visual Studio Team Services

So mostly for entertainment sake and to see how easy it would be, I wondered if I could create a Python-based lambda in AWS using GitHub and Visual Studio Online. So, let’s see how this goes and how long it takes …

Pre-Requisites

For this little experiment, you will need:

A GitHub account
An Azure account
An AWS account

Set Up the Development Environment

Let’s create an empty repository in GitHub as we need somewhere to keep code! Go to https://github.com/new and create a new repository, I called mine PythonLambda. I made it public and with a README (so not empty to start).

Next hop over to Visual Studio Online and click get started. You will then need to log in using your Azure account. Then click Create Environment. Enter in a name (I chose the same as the GitHub project) and then paste the URL for the GitHub repo into the Git repository. Click create and wait for it to be available.

Next, connect to the environment. A window that looks remarkably like Visual Studio Code will appear; I chose to install support for Python. This took virtually no time whatsoever. Next hit Ctrl-' to open the terminal windows. Let’s check for python by running python --version:

On to installing the AWS CLI. Simply run the command pip3 install awscli --upgrade --user. Once this completes you can run aws --version:

So now we have a working development environment. Took about 3 minutes to set this up. We have a git repository, a copy of Visual Studio Code set up to write python code and the AWS CLI.

Logging into GitHub and AWS

Next, we can edit the README and check we can push back to GitHub as a new branch. Change the README file and save it. You can then go to Source Control tab (press Ctrl-Shift-G), commit the files and push to GitHub. It will pop up a window asking you to authorise microsoft-vs to access your GitHub account. After that, it will push the code to GitHub.

Next head to the AWS IAM console and log in. Ideally, you will create a new user but for the sake of simplicity, I will just create a new access key. Go to the Users link, find your user, go to Security Credentials and select Create Access Key. Back within the terminal in Visual Studio Online run aws configure and copy the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key into the prompts.

This step took me about 5 minutes. So, we are ready to start building the lambda in about 10 minutes.

Make a Python Lambda and Publish

The goal of this post is not really the Lambda more just to get it all set up. The code below is a really trivial function. Create a new file called lambda.py and add the new content:

This is a very simple function which will log whatever is passed to it and return the servers current date.

The bare minimum we need to do for a lambda to run is to create an IAM role and policy, and then we can publish a function. Run the following within the terminal:

This will create the Role and Policy for the lambda to use. Finally, lets publish the first version of the lambda. In the terminal, run:

Finally, we will set up a build task to publish this to AWS. Create a new folder called .vscode and add a new file called tasks.json. Add the following content:

Now if you hit Ctrl-Shift-B within the editor, it will zip and deploy the python code as it stands to AWS.

Wrapping Up

Visual Studio Online is amazing. You can get a development environment up and running in minutes. It works anywhere and can easily be hooked into whatever you like. While this post has only created a very basic set up, it is hopefully enough to show you how you could do everything from the comfort of your own browser and in very little time.

This post was also published on my own personal blog - jdunkerley.co.uk

Aws Lambda Visual Studio 2017

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