Asynchronous Background Processing for Ruby or Rails using AWS Lambda Extensions

Ever since writing this post last year on Using New Relic APM with Rails on AWS Lambda, I have always wanted to find a way to send APM data in a way that did not add extra milliseconds to the application's response times. Likewise, for smaller projects it would be nice to have a lightweight alternative to Lambdakiq for ActiveJob similar to Brandon Hilkert's popular SuckerPunch gem. Today we have both with the LambdaPunch gem.LambdaPunch: Async Processing using Lambda ExtensionsSince this is my first, dive into the now generally available Lambda Extensions API, I'd like to share a little bit of how LambdaPunch works. Huge credit to AWS Community Builder Duarte Nunes for this post Building an AWS Lambda extension with Rust which is a great in-depth read on how to author Lambda Extensions. Following is what makes our Ruby/Rails extension interesting.