LAS VEGAS – Developers building serverless applications on top of Amazon Web Services’ Lambda service will now be able to use more of their favorite development environments and programming languages.
Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels announced Thursday during his developer-oriented keynote at re:Invent 2018 that AWS will now support three popular software development environments — PyCharm, IntelliJ, and VS Code — with the release of AWS Toolkits for each one. The Toolkits will allow developers to create and deploy serverless applications in a familiar environment, and it will also release those toolkits under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.
Vogels also announced that Lambda now supports any major programming language through Lambda Runtime API, which will allow developers to specify their language runtime when creating a function in Lambda. Previously, Lambda only supported some of the more widely used languages, such as Java and Node.js.
“Now there is no limitation to what kind of language you can use to do serverless development,” Vogels said.
Serverless computing is a growing software development technique that allows developers to write their application code without having to know anything about the hardware that runs that application. AWS had led the way with serverless, announcing Lambda in 2014 and adding new features and services at a steady clip ever since.
Vogels also introduced several developer-friendly features that drew applause from the crowd, including the addition of eight additional AWS services to AWS Step Functions, a managed development workflow service provided by the cloud leader. He also announced that AWS API Gateway will allow developers to use Websockets to create serverless applications that can enjoy two-way communications between the end user and the application server without having to reload the app.
