[Exploration] Plugins

Currently we are exploring ways to extend SAM CLI’s (Serverless Application Model Command Line Interface) functionality by allowing developers to build plugins. We are considering three kinds of plugins -

1. IaC plugins enable SAM CLI build and package steps to be run on IaC frameworks that are not currently supported.
2. Local Emulator Plugins increase the local testability of infrastructure by creating emulators for dependencies not currently supported.
3. Workflow Customization allows plugins to add custom steps in the SAM CLI build workflow.

Of the three options above, which is the most useful to you and why? Which is the least useful?

[iongion]

This is great, waiting for it so much, dreaming of being able to extend and make it able to:

• Hot reload code on local fille change avoiding sam full build for those languages where it is not needed
• Control schedule functions, disable auto trigger or trigger manually
• Ability to add custom web pages as dashboards, for example one that mounts api docs, the swagger ui collected from parsing http events
• Use other container engines besides docker

For all above my current solution is a custom sam local emulator, built on flask, but I needed to implement a custom cloudformation parser, far from what real sam supports. And it just lives in my own world instead of sharing with others.

Great ideea and hope it shapes up!

[ghost]

Option 3 would be quite useful for me to address problems like https://github.com/aws/serverless-application-model/issues/2150. In the case CloudFormation does not end up with semantics to express embedded data types, I would want to develop a way to do so. By authoring that as an extension I could also share it with the broader community.