Sling Lambda - A native Sling for the edge

Apache Sling lends itself incredibly well as a foundation for long running servers but doesn’t typically cater for serverless environments that demand flexible scalability. However, its architecture, with an extensible resource tree and rendering pipeline, offers a powerful mechanism for pre-constructing content such as static webpages. The recent introduction of the 'bring your own markup' feature in AEM Sites Edge Delivery Services further broadens the content source spectrum as it makes it possible to have other content providers as well. This innovative approach allows for a content source to supply content on a page preview request, essentially pre-constructing your pages rather than serving them dynamically.

In our session, we'll explore a streamlined Sling distribution, constructed out of composable minimal features. With this you can convert markdown into Edge Delivery Service compatible HTML with a minimal set of Bundles. We'll then introduce a new feature launcher extension which facilitates the running of features on Apache Felix Atomos.

Finally, we’ll show how you can use a newly created maven plugin to compile these minimal features together with the Atomos launcher to native code using GraalVM.

At the end, we'll demonstrate the integration of the result in a serverless function as the content source for an Edge Delivery Services project. Here, Sling is employed to render the content within milliseconds using minimal resources. Join us to explore this seed of a possible serverless future of content rendering with Apache Sling.