Earlier this week, I gave a talk at the Melbourne Compose Group (mailing list) about using Haskell to implement AWS Lambda functions. Lambda is AWS’s “function-as-a-service offering”, where your code runs in an isolated “microVM” on AWS-managed infrastructure and you pay only for the resources used while your code runs.

As a mature AWS service, Lambda has a lot of features and knobs, and many of the blog posts I’ve read about deploying to Lambda were closer to “draw two circles” than “how to draw the owl”.

I’ve wanted to address this gap for a long time. To prepare for the talk, I built an end-to-end example of how to build Haskell functions (plus some useful AWS utilities) into OCI-format containers, upload those containers to AWS, and use OpenTofu to configure Lambda Functions that use them. It’s heavily commented and I hope it’s useful. Slides from the talk are also available.

The Compose organisers and audience were great — lots of good questions and many of us kept the conversation going over dinner on Lygon St. If you’re at all interested in FP, I’d recommend checking them out.