On 14 November 2025, AWS announced that Rust support in AWS Lambda is now Generally Available (GA), graduating from its previous “experimental” status to a fully supported runtime for production workloads, backed by AWS Support and the Lambda SLA.

If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to bring Rust into your serverless stack, this is it.

What exactly did AWS announce?

Here’s the short version of the announcement: Amazon Web Services, Inc.+1

• Rust is now a first-class, officially supported runtime for AWS Lambda
• It’s recommended for production (no more “experimental” caveats)
• It’s covered by the Lambda SLA and AWS Support plans
• It’s available in all AWS Regions, including GovCloud and the China regions
• The official docs now include a dedicated “Building Lambda functions with Rust” section

The AWS Compute Blog post “Building serverless applications with Rust on AWS Lambda” walks through the high-level story, patterns, and tooling around this new runtime, including the use of Cargo Lambda to simplify development and deployment. Amazon Web Services, Inc.+1

Why Rust is a big deal for serverless

Rust has been popular with systems and backend engineers for years, but GA support in Lambda makes it much more attractive for day-to-day cloud workloads.

Key reasons Rust shines in serverless: Amazon Web Services, Inc.+1

• Performance – Rust compiles to native code with no VM, which often means very low cold start times and excellent runtime performance.
• Memory safety – The borrow checker and strong type system help eliminate whole classes of bugs (nulls, data races, many buffer overflows) at compile time.
• Predictable resource usage – No garbage collector pauses; you control allocations explicitly, which is ideal for tight Lambda memory/CPU budgets.
• Ecosystem maturity – A growing set of crates for HTTP, JSON, async I/O, and AWS integrations make Rust a realistic choice beyond “toy” projects.

For latency-sensitive, CPU-heavy, or high-throughput workloads, this combo of performance + safety is very compelling.

Where Rust fits in the AWS serverless story

Over the last few years, AWS has been quietly building out the Rust story:

• The AWS SDK for Rust provides async, strongly-typed access to AWS services. AWS Documentation+1
• The aws-lambda-rust-runtime GitHub project gives a first-party runtime library and event types for writing Lambda functions in Rust. GitHub
• Now, with GA Rust support in Lambda, you can run business-critical apps in Rust and still stay fully within the supported Lambda ecosystem. Amazon Web Services, Inc.+1

Put simply: Rust is no longer a “hack it in with a custom runtime” option. It now sits alongside Node.js, Python, Java, .NET, and others as a fully supported language choice for Lambda. AWS Documentation

What this means if you already use Lambda

If you’re heavily invested in Lambda today (Node/Python/etc.), you don’t need to rewrite everything in Rust. But you now have a serious new tool in the box.

Consider Rust for functions that are:

• Performance-sensitive (e.g. API endpoints with strict latency SLOs)
• CPU-bound (data processing, image manipulation, custom crypto, parsers)
• High-throughput (large volumes of events / messages)
• Security-critical, where Rust’s safety guarantees help reduce risk

Continue using Python/Node.js where:

• Developer productivity and rapid iteration matter more than raw performance
• You’re mostly orchestrating AWS services (“glue” functions)
• Ecosystem libraries you rely on are stronger outside Rust

The nice part: you can mix and match. A single serverless application might have some functions in Python and a handful of Rust “hot paths” where every millisecond counts.

When should you try Rust on Lambda?

Some practical starting points:

• Performance-critical endpoints that are already pushing the limits in Python/Node
• Security-sensitive workloads, where memory safety is a priority
• Internal tools and services where your team is keen to learn Rust anyway

You don’t have to migrate everything. Start with one small Lambda and grow from there as the team becomes comfortable with Rust’s tooling and patterns.

Categories: AWS, Developer Chat

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