Arbitrary Binaries on AWS Lambda

Since the beginning of AWS Lambda, developers could launch a child process to execute any arbitrary binary on Linux. The release of the “go1.x” runtime for AWS Lambda simplifies the deployment of arbitrary binaries. Binaries need only be statically-linked and given execute permissions for all (chmod 444) to be successfully run on AWS Lambda.

Below I’ve embedded a piece of code to observe the Lambda environment.

I performed the following steps to create a Zip file and then uploaded that Zip file to Lambda.

GOOS=linux go build -o main lambda.go
zip deployment.zip main

Here are the resulting CloudWatch logs for lambda.go.

And here is an example of a C++ program running in AWS Lambda.

I performed the following steps to create a Zip file and then uploaded that Zip file to Lambda.

g++ -static lambda.cpp -o main
chmod a+x main
zip deployment.zip main

Here are the resulting CloudWatch logs for lambda.cpp.