v0.3 - Official PHP support on Lambda, better performances and AWS SAM

[mnapoli]

This pull request will contain all the changes planned for v0.3 to keep master (v0.2.*) stable in the meantime.

The future website for Bref 0.3: bref.sh

Summary of changes

AWS has released an API to provide support for any language in Lambda. Bref will move from its Javascript-based hack to this new official API.

Bref will provide a PHP runtime optimized for CLI scripts (workers, CLI tasks, simple PHP lambdas, etc.) as well as another PHP runtime optimized for HTTP applications (based on PHP-FPM).

It is very likely that Bref will switch from the "serverless framework" to using AWS SAM instead for deployment and configuration (see #99). On top of advanced integration to other AWS services, this brings very useful tools for local development based on Docker.

With v0.3 it will be even easier to integrate HTTP applications and support any framework. Performances will also dramatically increase thanks to research and benchmarks as well as new experimental modes to run PHP faster in some scenarios (more information to come).

Finally, Bref v0.3 will come with a completely rewritten and extensive documentation.

v0.3

Check out the v0.3 Kanban board.

Detailed changes

• Lambda layer for the PHP runtime #106 PHP runtime for AWS Lambda (built through the official support for 3rd party languages)
• Add a client for the Lambda runtime API #112 Client for the Lambda runtime API
• PHP-FPM runtime #115 PHP-FPM runtime optimized for HTTP applications
• Add console runtime for Symfony Console and Laravel Artisan #122 A console runtime for Console applications
• Remove the λ function because it duplicated the lambda function #124 The λ() function was replaced by a lambda() function
• Website and documentation for v0.3 #127 Website and documentation
• Migrate to AWS SAM for development and deployment #126 Migrate to AWS SAM for deployments
• PHP Layer(s) Runtime Pipeline for v3.0 #129 an industrialized build pipeline for the runtimes

[nealio82]

This is amazing! What's the long-term plan for building the runtime? Will bref provide stock runtimes for people who are just trying things out?

Also, will building the runtime be invoked as part of the first bref deploy or does the user always need to do it themselves? What about for using SAM local? It might be nice to have a single bref develop command in the Makefile which creates the runtime and sets up the config for SAM Local.

[mnapoli]

@nealio82 I finally answered in #114: #114 (comment)

About building runtimes: ideally you shouldn't have to worry about this, it just works (see the WIP instructions in the diff: https://github.com/mnapoli/bref/pull/113/files#diff-279a8ca151371a6a63058dc411985dd1R9). And locally it just works too, SAM is incredibly awesome for this. The only thing I'm worried with SAM when running locally is performances because you get a cold start every time. But you can also still run Symfony/Laravel the only way locally, it still works that way. We'll see as we use it more.

[mnapoli]

Merging so that we can work on master to prepare the new release 🎉

Thanks everyone involved! The new release is happening in a few days if all goes well.