By Rob Allen

In recent years, a different way to build applications has arisen called serverless computing. This term is not a good name; I’m reminded of the adage that there are two hard problems in programming: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. Serverless computing as a name implies no servers, but there are servers—you don’t think about them though. A better way to think about it is that the servers and the management of them are abstracted away and the provider manages the allocation of resources, not the application architect.

Amazon Lambda arguably started Serverless computing. It is a system where your code runs on demand and is not even in memory if it’s not running. We call this functions as a service (FaaS). Modular code executes in response to an event, and so different parts of our application can be scaled independently without any additional effort on our part. The main advantages are that we spend more our time concentrating on the core of an application that brings value and far less worrying about how to run and scale it. There’s also a lovely side-benefit in that you only pay when your code is running, so your costs are proportional to usage. As FaaS encourages building small independent units of functionality, you also get modular applications.

Of course, there were also disadvantages. It is harder to reason about an application which is spread over many separate functions and services. It’s also harder to debug and keep track of which functions are deployed where. FaaS and serverless are not a solution to every problem but are a good solution for a large number of use-cases.

In this article, I’m going to walk through how to use Lambda with PHP to execute a function. In part two, I will build a static website hosted on S3, with a CDN updated via a Lambda function. To do this, we use Bref. Created by Matthieu Napoli, Bref contains all the functionality required to deploy PHP functions into Lambda in a simple, clean and easy manner. It provides runtimes for PHP 7.2 and 7.3. It is closely tied to Amazon, so if you’re interested in running PHP in say IBM Cloud Functions, you would use a different tool, such as Serverless Framework.

Let’s get started by setting up AWS.

Setting Up AWS

Let’s start by creating a single Lambda Hello World application. First, we have to start with our prerequisites: the AWS command line tools and an AWS account. This involves more steps than you would initially think because AWS has a robust and complete permissions system called IAM that controls user access, so in addition to installing the command line tools, we also need to set up a user with enough permissions to create our application.

There are two command line tools we need: aws and sam. As you can guess, from its name, aws is the command line tool which allows access to all of the AWS system. The other tool, sam is the way we interact with AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) system which is used by Bref. To install the aws command line tool, head to https://aws.amazon.com/cli/ and follow the instructions; for sam.

Now we have the tools we need to set up credentials so SAM can create and manage the application resources for us. If you don’t have an AWS account, head to https://console.aws.amazon.com and create one. The command line tools require access keys. To do this, we need a new user as we don’t want to use our master user. This process is well-described in the Serverless Framework documentation.

In summary:

1. Create or log into your AWS account and go to the Identity and Access Management (IAM) page.
2. Click on Users then Add User and enter the username bref-agent.
3. For the Access type, select Programmatic access only as this user needs CLI and API access, but not web console access.
4. Click Next: Permissions to set permissions for our user.
5. Click Attach existing policies directly and then Create Policy.
6. In the new tab that opens, click JSON and paste in the JSON from Listing 1.
7. Click Review Policy and assign it a name of “bref-agent-policy,” then click Create Policy, and close the tab to return to the tab where we are adding our user.
8. Click the refresh button (two arrows in a circle) on the right to refresh the list of available policies
9. Find bref-agent-policy in the list, check the box next to it, and click Next: Tags.
10. We don’t want to add any tags, so click Next: Review, and then Create user.

Listing 1

{
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Action": [
                "apigateway:*",
                "cloudformation:*",
                "dynamodb:*",
                "events:*",
                "iam:*",
                "lambda:*",
                "logs:*",
                "s3:*",
                "sns:*",
                "states:*"
            ],
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ],
    "Version": "2012-10-17"
}

Listing 1 is the set of permissions we give to the user that creates our serverless application, so it has administrative permissions to create S3 buckets, DynamoDB tables, CloudFormation stacks, IAM policies, and so on. It is a fairly open policy so for production use; you may want to lock it down some more with specific permissions for each group.

We now have a new user called bref-agent. Note the Access key ID and the Secret access key.

Configure the AWS CLI

The easiest way to configure the aws and sam tools is to run aws configure.

$ aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [None]: AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/EXAMPLEKEY
Default region name [None]: us-east-1
Default output format [None]: json

Use your Access key ID and the Secret access key at the prompts, set your region to us-east-1, and use JSON for your output format.

Now that we have AWS set up, we can write our first Lambda function.

Hello World With Bref

To create a Lambda function using Bref, we start with a new directory and install Bref into it:

$ mkdir bref-hello-world
$ cd bref-hello-world
$ composer require mnapoli/bref

These commands installed the Bref code into the vendor/ folder, so we can go ahead a create the project now. You’ll see something like Output 1

Output 1

$ vendor/bin/bref inito

   What kind of lambda do you want to create? (You will be
   able to add more functions later by editing
   `template.yaml`) [PHP function]:
    [0] PHP function
    [1] HTTP application
    [2] Console application
   > 0

  Creating template.yaml
  Creating index.php


[OK] Project initialized and ready to test or deploy.

Bref supports three different kinds of serverless projects depending on your needs. For our case, we want a standard Lambda function, so we select the [0] PHP function option, and then Bref creates our files. To learn more about the options, see the Bref documentation on runtimes

What Files Do We Have?

bref init has created two files of interest: template.yaml and index.php. Starting with template.yaml, we have the SAM template which is the configuration file which defines our application and in our case contains the definition of our first Lambda function (see Listing 2).

Listing 2

AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09'
  Transform: AWS::Serverless-2016-10-31
  Description: ''

  Resources:
    MyFunction:
      Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
      Properties:
        FunctionName: 'my-function'
        Description: ''
        CodeUri: .
        Handler: index.php
        Timeout: 10 # Timeout in seconds
        MemorySize: 1024 # Relates to pricing and CPU power
        Runtime: provided
        Layers:
          - 'arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:209497400698:layer:php-73:1'

The template file consists of a small header and the Resources section which holds our function. Its resource name isMyFunction and it has a type of AWS::Serverless::Function. To define our function’s properties, we provide a set of configuration information under the Properties key. The table below shows the key properties for a Lambda function.

As you can see, our template defines a single resource: a Lambda function called my-function that lives in index.php within the current directory. Let’s take a look at index.php:

<?php declare(strict_types=1);

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

lambda(function (array $event) {
   return 'Hello ' . ($event['name'] ?? 'world');
});

A Bref Lambda function is defined as a closure that’s an argument to Bref’s lambda() function. It takes an array $event which contains the input data to the function, and you can return whatever you want as long as it’s JSON serializable. This $event contains information about the request which triggered your lambda function. In this case, we return the string Hello followed by the name if it exists, otherwise world.

Deploying Our Function

If you used the us-east-1 region for your configuration as recommended, then we can go ahead and deploy our function immediately.

Deployment is done using the sam tool; however, first, we need to create an S3 bucket to store the CloudFormation stack in.

$ aws s3 mb s3://helloworld-rka-brefapp

You can name your bucket anything you like, but it must be globally unique. I like to postfix with my initials and the reason for the bucket to ensure it’s unique and that I can remember what it’s for.

There are two steps to deploying our application. First, we upload the code and generate a CloudFormation stack into our S3 bucket and then we deploy the stack:

$ sam package --output-template-file .stack.yaml \
 --s3-bucket helloworld-rka-brefapp
$ sam deploy --template-file .stack.yaml \
 --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM \
 --stack-name helloworld-rka-brefapp
$ rm .stack.yaml

The output template file (.stack.yaml) is an intermediate CloudFormation file and isn’t needed after deploy. The stack name must be unique within the AWS region, so I name it the same as my S3 bucket.

Running Our Function

To invoke our function, we can use bref.

$ vendor/bin/bref invoke my-function
   START RequestId: 4fa0f083-c02f-4b35-a23f-1e5e35d91af5 Version: $LATEST
   END RequestId: 4fa0f083-c02f-4b35-a23f-1e5e35d91af5
   REPORT RequestId: 4fa0f083-c02f-4b35-a23f-1e5e35d91af5

   Duration: 24.15 ms    Billed Duration: 100 ms     Memory Size: 1024 MB
   Max Memory Used: 68 MB

   "Hello world"

To send data to our function we can pass in a JSON object to the--eventparameter like this:

$ vendor/bin/bref invoke my-function --event '{"name": "Rob"}'

Which results in the output of Hello Rob.

Tidying Up

We can delete the application using:

aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name helloworld-rka-brefapp

We also need to delete the S3 bucket with:

aws s3 rb s3://helloworld-rka-brefapp

Other Ways to Invoke Our Function

Invoking a function with the command line or an authenticated AWS API call is not the easiest way to execute our code; usually, you want it to respond to an event of some sort. Lambda supports many different event sources, such as a queue, database change, S3 bucket change, HTTP request or a cron-type schedule. For your function to respond to an event, you need to update the template definition with the event you want to respond to. The list of event source types can be found in the SAM documentation.

To schedule our function at regular intervals, we add a Schedule event to our function in template.yaml like Listing 4.

Listing 4

   Resources:
       MyFunction:
           Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
           Properties:
               FunctionName: 'my-function'
               # ...
               Events:
                   MySchedule:
                       Type: Schedule
                       Properties:
                           Schedule: rate(1 minute)

We add a new property called events and can then add as many event sources as we want. In this case, we create one event source, MySchedule which has a rate of one minute. The schedule property may be either a cron or a rate expression as explained in Schedule Expressions for Rules in the CloudWatch documentation.

We run the sam package and sam deploy commands again to deploy the change to Lambda and now our function is executing once every minute.

To prove our function is executing once per minute, we can look in the CloudWatch logs. You can do this via the AWS console on the web or via the command line using the following command to see the Lambda function execution happening every minute.

$ sam logs --name my-function --tail

Don’t forget to remove the MySchedule event and redeploy to turn it off again.

Conclusion

I’ve given you a taste for writing serverless functions with PHP. It is a powerful paradigm, and with Bref, we can use our PHP easily on AWS Lambda. As PHP developers, we too can benefit from this environment where our code executes in response to an event, automatically scaled as required and best of all, we only pay when our code runs. There are many situations where this paradigm can be used to add functionality to an existing application or to write a brand new application such as an API.

As serverless applications tend to utilize other services, in part two of this series, I look at how we can write a real application which integrates a Lambda function with AWS S3 cloud storage and the CloudFront CDN in order create a static website updated with new images from Flickr.

Related Reading

• Moving a Monolith to AWS by Keanan Koppenhaver. May 2018.
• Community Corner: What’s the Fuss About Serverless? by James Titcumb. April 2018.