AWS Lambda Support for AWS X-Ray

Today we’re announcing general availability of AWS Lambda support for AWS X-Ray. As you may already know from Jeff’s GA POST, X-Ray is an AWS service for analyzing the execution and performance behavior of distributed applications. Traditional debugging methods don’t work so well for microservice based applications, in which there are multiple, independent components running on different services. X-Ray allows you to rapidly diagnose errors, slowdowns, and timeouts by breaking down the latency in your applications. I’ll demonstrate how you can use X-Ray in your own applications in just a moment by walking us through building and analyzing a simple Lambda based application.

If you just want to get started right away you can easily turn on X-Ray for your existing Lambda functions by navigating to your function’s configuration page and enabling tracing:

Or in the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) by updating the functions’s tracing-config (Be sure to pass in a --function-name as well):

$ aws lambda update-function-configuration --tracing-config '{"Mode": "Active"}'

When tracing mode is active Lambda will attempt to trace your function (unless explicitly told not to trace by an upstream service). Otherwise, your function will only be traced if it is explicitly told to do so by an upstream service. Once tracing is enabled, you’ll start generating traces and you’ll get a visual representation of the resources in your application and the connections (edges) between them. One thing to note is that the X-Ray daemon does consume some of your Lambda function’s resources. If you’re getting close to your memory limit Lambda will try to kill the X-Ray daemon to avoid throwing an out-of-memory error.

Let’s test this new integration out by building a quick application that uses a few different services.

As twenty-something with a smartphone I have a lot of pictures selfies (10000+!) and I thought it would be great to analyze all of them. We’ll write a simple Lambda function with the Java 8 runtime that responds to new images uploaded into an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. We’ll use Amazon Rekognition on the photos and store the detected labels in Amazon DynamoDB.

First, let’s define a few quick X-Ray vocabulary words: subsegments, segments, and traces. Got that? X-Ray is easy to understand if you remember that subsegments and segments make up traces which X-Ray processes to generate service graphs. Service graphs make a nice visual representation we can see above (with different colors indicating various request responses). The compute resources that run your applications send data about the work they’re doing in the form of segments. You can add additional annotations about that data and more granular timing of your code by creating subsgements. The path of a request through your application is tracked with a trace. A trace collects all the segments generated by a single request. That means you can easily trace Lambda events coming in from S3 all the way to DynamoDB and understand where errors and latencies are cropping up.

So, we’ll create an S3 bucket called selfies-bucket, a DynamoDB table called selfies-table, and a Lambda function. We’ll add a trigger to our Lambda function for the S3 bucket on ObjectCreated:All events. Our Lambda function code will be super simple and you can look at it in its entirety here. With no code changes we can enable X-Ray in our Java function by including the aws-xray-sdk and aws-xray-sdk-recorder-aws-sdk-instrumentor packages in our JAR.

Let’s trigger some photo uploads and get a look at the traces in X-Ray.

We’ve got some data! We can click on one of these individual traces for a lot of detailed information on our invocation.

In the first AWS::Lambda segment we see the dwell time of the function, how long it spent waiting to execute, followed by the number of execution attempts.

In the second AWS::Lambda::Function segment there are a few possible subsegments:

• The inititlization subsegment includes all of the time spent before your function handler starts executing
• The outbound service calls
• Any of your custom subsegments (these are really easy to add)

Hmm, it seems like there’s a bit of an issue on the DynamoDB side. We can even dive deeper and get the full exception stacktrace by clicking on the error icon. You can see we’ve been throttled by DynamoDB because we’re out of write capacity units. Luckily we can add more with just a few clicks or a quick API call. As we do that we’ll see more and more green on our service map!

The X-Ray SDKs make it super easy to emit data to X-Ray, but you don’t have to use them to talk to the X-Ray daemon. For Python, you can check out this library from rackspace called fleece. The X-Ray service is full of interesting stuff and the best place to learn more is by hopping over to the documentation. I’ve been using it for my @awscloudninja bot and it’s working great! Just keep in mind that this isn’t an official library and isn’t supported by AWS.

Personally, I’m really excited to use X-Ray in all of my upcoming projects because it really will save me some time and effort debugging and operating. I look forward to seeing what our customers can build with it as well. If you come up with any cool tricks or hacks please let me know!

– Randall