This post is written by Dennis Kieselhorst, Principal Solutions Architect.

The combination of portability, efficiency, community, and breadth of features has made Java a popular choice for businesses to build their applications for over 25 years. The introduction of serverless functions, pioneered by AWS Lambda, changed what you need in a programming language and runtime environment. Functions are often short-lived, single-purpose, and do not require extensive infrastructure configuration.

This blog post shows how you can modernize a legacy Java application to run on Lambda with minimal code changes using the updated AWS Serverless Java Container.

Deployment model comparison

Classic Java enterprise applications often run on application servers such as JBoss/ WildFly, Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere, or servlet containers like Apache Tomcat. The underlying Java virtual machine typically runs 24/7 and serves multiple requests using its multithreading capabilities.

Typical long running Java application server

When building Lambda functions with Java, an HTTP server is no longer required and there are other considerations for running code in a Lambda environment. Code runs in an execution environment, which processes a single invocation at a time. Functions can run for up to 15 minutes with a maximum of 10 Gb allocated memory.

Functions are triggered by events such as an HTTP request with a corresponding payload. An Amazon API Gateway HTTP request invokes the function with the following JSON payload:

Amazon API Gateway HTTP request payload

The code to process these events is different from how you implement it in a traditional application.

AWS Serverless Java Container

The AWS Serverless Java Container makes it easier to run Java applications written with frameworks such as Spring, Spring Boot, or JAX-RS/Jersey in Lambda.

The container provides adapter logic to minimize code changes. Incoming events are translated to the Servlet specification so that frameworks work as before.

AWS Serverless Java Container adapter

Version 1 of this library was released in 2018. Today, AWS is announcing the release of version 2, which supports the latest Jakarta EE specification, along with Spring Framework 6.x, Spring Boot 3.x and Jersey 3.x.

Example: Modifying a Spring Boot application

This following example illustrates how to migrate a Spring Boot 3 application. You can find the full example for Spring and other frameworks in the GitHub repository.

1. Add the AWS Serverless Java dependency to your Maven POM build file (or Gradle accordingly):
<dependency> <groupId>com.amazonaws.serverless</groupId> <artifactId>aws-serverless-java-container-springboot3</artifactId> <version>2.0.0</version> </dependency>
2. Spring Boot, by default, embeds Apache Tomcat to deal with HTTP requests. The examples use Amazon API Gateway to handle inbound HTTP requests so you can exclude the dependency.
<build> <plugins> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-shade-plugin</artifactId> <configuration> <createDependencyReducedPom>false</createDependencyReducedPom> </configuration> <executions> <execution> <phase>package</phase> <goals> <goal>shade</goal> </goals> <configuration> <artifactSet> <excludes> <exclude>org.apache.tomcat.embed:*</exclude> </excludes> </artifactSet> </configuration> </execution> </executions> </plugin> </plugins> </build>

The AWS Serverless Java Container accepts API Gateway proxy requests and transforms them into a plain Java object. The library also transforms outputs into a suitable API Gateway response object.

Once you run your build process, Maven’s Shade-plugin now produces an Uber-JAR that bundles all dependencies, which you can upload to Lambda.

3. The Lambda runtime must know which handler method to invoke. You can configure and use the SpringDelegatingLambdaContainerHandler implementation or implement your own handler Java class that delegates to AWS Serverless Java Container. This is useful if you want to add additional functionality.
4. Configure the handler name in the runtime settings of your function.


Configure the handler name

5. Configure an environment variable named MAIN_CLASS to let the generic handler know where to find your original application main class, which is usually annotated with @SpringBootApplication.


Configure MAIN_CLASS environment variable

You can also configure these settings using infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as AWS CloudFormation, the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), or the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM).

In an AWS SAM template, the related changes are as follows. Full templates are part of the GitHub repository.

Handler: com.amazonaws.serverless.proxy.spring.SpringDelegatingLambdaContainerHandler Environment: Variables: MAIN_CLASS: com.amazonaws.serverless.sample.springboot3.Application

Optimizing memory configuration

When running Lambda functions, start-up time and memory footprint are important considerations. The amount of memory you configure for your Lambda function also determines the amount of virtual CPU available. Adding more memory proportionally increases the amount of CPU, and therefore increases the overall computational power available. If a function is CPU-, network- or memory-bound, adding more memory can improve performance.

Lambda charges for the total amount of gigabyte-seconds consumed by a function. Gigabyte-seconds are a combination of total memory (in gigabytes) and duration (in seconds). Increasing memory incurs additional cost. However, in many cases, increasing the memory available causes a decrease in the function duration due to the additional CPU available. As a result, the overall cost increase may be negligible for additional performance, or may even decrease.

Choosing the memory allocated to your Lambda functions is an optimization process that balances speed (duration) and cost. You can manually test functions by selecting different memory allocations and measuring the completion time. AWS Lambda Power Tuning is a tool to simplify and automate the process, which you can use to optimize your configuration.

Power Tuning uses AWS Step Functions to run multiple concurrent versions of a Lambda function at different memory allocations and measures the performance. The function runs in your AWS account, performing live HTTP calls and SDK interactions, to measure performance in a production scenario.

Improving cold-start time with AWS Lambda SnapStart

Traditional applications often have a large tree of dependencies. Lambda loads the function code and initializes dependencies during Lambda lifecycle initialization phase. With many dependencies, this initialization time may be too long for your requirements. AWS Lambda SnapStart for Java based functions can deliver up to 10 times faster startup performance.

Instead of running the function initialization phase on every cold-start, Lambda SnapStart runs the function initialization process at deployment time. Lambda takes a snapshot of the initialized execution environment. This snapshot is encrypted and persisted in a tiered cache for low latency access. When the function is invoked and scales, Lambda resumes the execution environment from the persisted snapshot instead of running the full initialization process. This results in lower startup latency.

To enable Lambda SnapStart you must first enable the configuration setting, and also publish a function version.



Enabling SnapStart

Ensure you point your API Gateway endpoint to the published version or an alias to ensure you are using the SnapStart enabled function.

The corresponding settings in an AWS SAM template contain the following:

SnapStart: ApplyOn: PublishedVersions AutoPublishAlias: my-function-alias

Read the Lambda SnapStart compatibility considerations in the documentation as your application may contain specific code that requires attention.

Conclusion

When building serverless applications with Lambda, you can deliver features faster, but your language and runtime must work within the serverless architectural model. AWS Serverless Java Container helps to bridge between traditional Java Enterprise applications and modern cloud-native serverless functions.

You can optimize the memory configuration of your Java Lambda function using AWS Lambda Power Tuning tool and enable SnapStart to optimize the initial cold-start time.

The self-paced Java on AWS Lambda workshop shows how to build cloud-native Java applications and migrate existing Java application to Lambda.

Explore the AWS Serverless Java Container GitHub repo where you can report related issues and feature requests.

For more serverless learning resources, visit Serverless Land.