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OpenTelemetry Lambda Java

Layers for running Java applications on AWS Lambda with OpenTelemetry.

Prerequisites

  • Supports Lambda functions using Java 8 (java8.al2) and later
  • The deprecated runtime Java 8 (java8) is not supported as it does not support exec wrappers.

Provided layers

Two types of layers are provided

Java agent

The OpenTelemetry Java Agent is bundled into the base of the layer and can be loaded into a Lambda function by specifying the AWS_LAMBDA_EXEC_WRAPPER=/opt/otel-handler in your Lambda configuration. The agent will be automatically loaded and instrument your application for all supported libraries.

Note, automatic instrumentation has a notable impact on startup time on AWS Lambda and you will generally need to use this along with provisioned concurrency and warmup requests to serve production requests without causing timeouts on initial requests while it initializes.

Fast startup for Java agent

Fast startup mode is disabled by default but can be enabled by specifying the OTEL_JAVA_AGENT_FAST_STARTUP_ENABLED=true in your Lambda configuration.

When fast startup mode is enabled, JIT (Just-In-Time) Tiered compilation is configured to stop at level 1 and bytecode verification is disabled. So, the JVM uses the C1 compiler which is optimized for fast start-up time. This compiler (C1) quickly produces optimized native code but it does not generate any profiling data and never uses the C2 compiler which optimized for the best overall performance but uses more memory and takes a longer time to achieve it. Therefore, this option is not enabled by default and needs to be enabled by the user explicitly by taking care of the behavioural change mentioned above.

For more information about the idea behind this optimization, you can check the following resources:

Wrapper

OpenTelemetry Lambda Instrumentation and OpenTelemetry SDK are bundled into the java/lib directory to be available on the classpath of the Lambda function. No code change is needed to instrument the execution of your function, but you will need to set the AWS_LAMBDA_EXEC_WRAPPER environment variable pointing to the appropriate wrapper for the type of handler.

  • /opt/otel-handler - for wrapping regular handlers (implementing RequestHandler)
  • /opt/otel-sqs-handler - for wrapping SQS-triggered function handlers (implementing RequestHandler)
  • /opt/otel-proxy-handler - for wrapping regular handlers (implementing RequestHandler) proxied through API Gateway, enabling HTTP context propagation
  • /opt/otel-stream-handler - for wrapping streaming handlers (implementing RequestStreamHandler), enabling HTTP context propagation for HTTP requests

AWS SDK instrumentation is also included and loaded automatically if you use the AWS SDK.

For any other library, such as OkHttp, you will need to include the corresponding library instrumentation from the instrumentation project and modify your code to initialize it in your function.

Building

To build the Java Agent layer, run

./gradlew :layer-javaagent:build

The layer zip file will be present at ./layer-javaagent/build/distributions/opentelemetry-javaagent-layer.zip.

To build the wrapper layer, run

./gradlew :layer-wrapper:build

The layer zip file will be present at ./layer-wrapper/build/distributions/opentelemetry-java-wrapper.zip.

Sample applications

Sample applications are provided to show usage the above layers.

  • Application using AWS SDK - shows how both the wrapper and agent can be used with an application using AWS SDK without code change.

  • Application using OkHttp - shows the manual initialization of OkHttp library instrumentation for use with the wrapper. The agent would be usable without such a code change at the expense of the cold start overhead it introduces.