AWS Lambda and APNs

We decided to use AWS Lambda to handle messaging (sms, email & push) that needs to scale very quickly during peak times, previously we were using SQS with eb worker applications but found that message time was severely delayed during peak times.

Apple has recently changed from using p12 certs to a new system of non expiring p8 key. This is explained very well here;

The problem is that most libs/gems/packages do not yet support the new Apple p8 format.

Another problem is that AWS Lambda only supports certain version of node/python etc. Python 2.7.12 and Node 4.3

The only node module I could find that supports the Apple p8 format is node-apns

I could not get this working at it seems there are some issues with older node versions thus it does not work on Lambda

The only Python lib I could find that supports the p8 format is this

This worked temporarily but stopped working at some point after a minor change and as there is basically no exceptions so impossible to debug, thus we had to abandon it.

In the end we had to revert to using the old p12 format for APNS using this python lib.

So my questions are;

1. What is the best package (in any language) for sending Apple pushes using the new p8 format on AWS Lambda?
2. Is there a better way (non AWS Lambda) of sending messages that handle large spikes in traffic.

Thoughts much appreciated.

via Iain Watt