High Performance Lambdas with Rust

Why Rust?

Rust is a modern compiled language that excels in creating high-performance, memory-safe applications. It is a great fit for performance-critical serverless use cases with Lambda, offering native C/C++ level performance with safety.

• Performance: Rust’s design prioritizes efficiency, giving execution times and a memory footprint comparable to native C/C++. Rust performs significantly better than other application language stacks (e.g., Python, Node.js, C#, and Java).
• Safety: Rust’s focus on memory safety mitigates common bugs like null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows prevalent in C and C++.
• Correctness: Rust’s type system highlights fallible calls and data absence, aiding developers in identifying and handling edge cases explicitly.
• Productivity: With a robust type system, refined compiler, and extensive developer tool ecosystem, Rust empowers teams to achieve more.

Lambda and Rust

Rust is a great choice for (re)implementing performance-critical Lambda functions. Given that the lambda pricing model is:

Cost = Allocated Memory x Execution Time

Benefits:

• Improved Performance: Rust can deliver a significant boost for performance-critical Lambda functions, slashing execution time.
• Lower Cost: Rust’s efficient execution characteristics and low memory footprint can provide a significant cost reduction for highly used Lambda functions.
• Reduced Cold Start Impact: Thanks to its performance characteristics, Rust can significantly reduce the cost of cold starts. Typically, Rust cold starts are in the order of 10-50ms, as opposed to 500-2000ms generally observed in Python, JavaScript, and Java.
• Reduced Carbon Footprint: By adopting Rust for your performance-critical Lambdas, you’re not just optimizing for performance – you’re actively contributing to more sustainable cloud deployments.