AWS shoves Java 11 support into Lambda serverless toy box

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has hauled in Java 11 support to its Lambda serverless platform, along with other upgrades and a new service for container log management.

Java 11 backing comes via Corretto, the AWS distribution of the OpenJDK, and joins the existing Java 8 support. Java 11 is a long-term support (LTS) release, a status designated only once every three years. It has been generally available since September 2018 so AWS has not rushed to support it in Lambda.

The cloud giant has also announced the Node.js 12 LTS release and Python 3.8 in AWS Lambda.

With Kubecon under way in San Diego, AWS has also taken the opportunity to announce managed worker nodes for its Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). A node is a VM instance in EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and managed node groups enable EKS to create and manage these EC2 instances automatically. Instances must be part of an EC2 Auto Scaling Group (ASG) where you can specify a minimum and maximum size for the group.

"This lays the groundwork to provide you with an end-to-end managed data plane, that is, we can take care of anything from security patches to Kubernetes version updates to monitoring and alerting," enthused developer advocate Michael Hausenblas.

Staying with the container theme, AWS also pulled the sheets off a new service. FireLens is a container log router for ECS (Elastic Container Service), which includes Fargate, a serverless approach to running containers.

FireLens supports Fluentd and Fluent Bit, which means you can use output plugins as well as filtering and routing logs to other services within AWS or elsewhere. It was already possible to use Fluent Bit with ECS by deploying it in a separate container, but the built-in service will be that bit easier to use. ®