{"id":1438,"date":"2018-03-28T14:00:47","date_gmt":"2020-02-18T06:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blg2\/?p=1438"},"modified":"2020-02-18T16:51:36","modified_gmt":"2020-02-18T16:51:36","slug":"post-1432","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/?p=1438","title":{"rendered":"Compiling Python into an AWS Step Function"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amazon provide a very large collection of services<\/a> for running your computations, websites, etc., on their infrastructure. One of the approaches these services enable is ‘serverless computing<\/em>‘, which, as they put it<\/a>, lets you ‘build and run applications and services without thinking about servers’.<\/p>\n

Two of the components of this are ‘Lambda<\/a>‘ and ‘Step Functions<\/a>‘. Very briefly: Lambda lets you upload Python (or Go, or…) code and leave Amazon work out where to run it. Step Functions allow you to coordinate multiple interlinked stages of a computation, which can include Lambda invocations.<\/p>\n

To specify a Step Function, you describe a state machine in JSON. This struck me as cumbersome compared to the normal way we describe how we want multiple components of a computation to work together: normally, we write a Python (or Go, or…) program. To explore this idea, I put together a ‘plausibility argument of concept’ for the idea that Python could be compiled into a Step Function specification:<\/p>\n