C# and AWS Lambdas, Part 2 - Web API and an API Gateway

Feb 18, 2021 # dotNet Core 3.1, AWS, dotNet, AWS Lambda, Function as a Service

Want to learn more about AWS Lambda and .NET? Check out my A Cloud Guru course on ASP.NET Web API and Lambda.

Full source code available here.

In the previous post I created a Lambda that executed a C# console application. In this post, I walk through creating a .NET Core 3.1 Web API application inside a Lambda and making it reachable from the web, just like a normal Web API application.

First, update the Lambda tools, they have fixed a bug in the csproj file of the template, that I described in the first post of this series.

dotnet new -i Amazon.Lambda.Templates::5.1.0

Create a new application.

dotnet new serverless.AspNetCoreWebAPI --name WebAPILambda

In LambdaEntryPoint.cs change the class it inherits from to Amazon.Lambda.AspNetCoreServer.APIGatewayHttpApiV2ProxyFunction.

For the sake of this demo, I’m going to change very little, and show a GET and a POST call.

Add a Person class.

 1namespace WebAPILambda.Models
 2{
 3    public class Person
 4    {
 5        public string FirstName { get; set; }
 6        public string LastName { get; set; }
 7
 8        public override string ToString()
 9        {
10            return $"{FirstName} {LastName}";
11        }
12    }
13}

Replace the ValuesController class with this -

 1[Route("api/[controller]")]
 2public class ValuesController : ControllerBase
 3{
 4
 5    [HttpGet]
 6    public string Get()
 7    {
 8        return $"Hello World from inside a Lambda {DateTime.Now}";
 9    }
10
11    [HttpGet("{id}")]
12    public string Get(int id)
13    {
14        return $"You asked for {id}";
15    }
16
17    [HttpPost]
18    public IActionResult Post([FromBody] Person person)
19    {
20        return Ok($"You sent {person.ToString()}");
21    }
22}

Build it. You can try it by starting the application locally and use as a normal Web API application.

Zip the contents of the WebAPILambda/bin/Debug/netcoreapp3.1 directory in a file named WebAPILambda.zip.

We’re done with the code.

Create the Lambda

I’m not going to show the detailed steps because they are described in part 1 of this series of posts.

But there is one difference - make this the handler WebAPILambda::WebAPILambda.LambdaEntryPoint::FunctionHandlerAsync.

Upload the zip as shown in part 1.

You should be able to paste in the content of the test/WebAPILambda.Tests/SampleRequests/ValuesController-Get.json from the source code into the Lambda test feature, but the Json generated by the template does NOT work with a LambdaEntryPoint that inherits from APIGatewayHttpApiV2ProxyFunction.

That’s the Lambda setup.

Now we need to send some web requests to it.

API Gateway

There are a few choices here, I am going to show how to use the HTTP API because it is simpler.

Click Create API.

Top of the list should be HTTP API, click Build.

Hit Add integration, choose Lambda and pick the Lambda function defined in the previous step. Select Version 2.0. Give the API a name. Hit next.

For route configuration leave the METHOD as ANY. Change resource path to /api/values - this matches the route in the Web API controller in the application.