Lambda-Extension release notesRSS

Major Release: Rust Rewrite

Complete rewrite of the New Relic Lambda Extension from Go (v2.3.24) to Rust for improved performance, memory safety, and reduced cold start times.

New Features

• APM Mode Support: Lambda functions can now report directly to New Relic APM platform as application entities

  • Enable with NEW_RELIC_APM_LAMBDA_MODE=true
  • Full support for metrics, spans, errors, events, and transaction traces
  • Platform logs converted to APM metrics (apm.lambda.transaction.*)
  • Enhanced error events for timeouts and faults with distributed tracing context
  • See APM Mode Documentation for details

• Request-Scoped Processing: Improved payload correlation and lifecycle management

• Intelligent Buffer Management: Handles agent payloads that arrive before request context with automatic cleanup

Performance Improvements

• Faster Cold Starts: Optimized Rust compilation with minimal dependencies and LTO
• Lower Memory Usage: Reduced memory footprint with zero-cost abstractions
• Concurrent Processing: Parallel processing of logs, platform metrics, and agent telemetry
• Connection Pooling: HTTP client connection reuse across invocations

Security & Reliability

• Memory Safety: Rust's ownership system prevents memory leaks and buffer overflows
• Panic Safety: Global panic handler prevents Lambda crashes from extension failures
• Type Safety: Compile-time guarantees eliminate entire classes of runtime errors

Technical Changes

• Migrated from Go v1.23 to Rust 2021 edition
• Built on Tokio async runtime
• AWS SDK v1 for Rust (aws-config 1.8, aws-sdk-secretsmanager 1.88, aws-sdk-ssm 1.93)
• Modular architecture with clean separation of concerns

Configuration

All existing environment variables remain unchanged for backwards compatibility. Key variables:

• NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY: New Relic license key
• NEW_RELIC_APM_LAMBDA_MODE: Enable APM mode (default: false)
• NEW_RELIC_EXTENSION_SEND_FUNCTION_LOGS: Send function logs (default: false)
• NEW_RELIC_LAMBDA_LOG_LEVEL: Extension log level supports more granular control with info, debug, warn, error, trace, all

Full configuration details in the README.

Migration Notes

• Drop-in Replacement: No code changes required for existing users
• Environment Variables: All configuration remains the same
• Binary Compatibility: Maintains compatibility with existing New Relic agents
• Performance: Expect 20-40% faster cold starts and lower memory usage

[2.3.24] - Go Implementation (Legacy)

Last Go-based version before Rust migration. Maintained for reference and legacy support.

Fixed

• Updated Go std lib version to 1.23.12 to resolve CVE-2025-47907
• APM Mode: Resolved license key issue with SM/SSM in APM Mode & resolved log prefix

New feature

• Added Log Level Prefix DEBUG and INFO to the existing prefix [NR_EXT]
• APM Mode: Added tags to APM Mode
• APM Mode: Added Lambda ARN to host for APM connect
• APM Mode: Updated backoff duration for NEW_RELIC_HOST
• APM Mode: Refactor APM error event data
• APM Mode: Added ruby support

Notes

• Added option to build nodejs test Layers for local testing

Fixed

• Updated AWS SDK and Go Version to address Security Vulnerabilities [CVE-2020-8911, CVE-2020-8912, CVE-2025-0913, CVE-2025-4673]

Notes

• Added APM connect retry logic
• Added godebug to resolve AWS Firewall issue
• Added requestId extraction from logs for Node.js runtime

Fixed

• Updated Readme for --enable-license-key-secret

Notes

• APM Fusion Mode: Limited Preview

Notes

• Added logic to check the shutdown of logserver and prevent handler from sending messages to log channel

• Remove Circle CI workflow

Fixed

• Add WaitGroup to resolve log server panic resulting from multiple log server handlers sending logs to closed channel

Notes

• Updates go version to resolve go/stdlib vulnerability

• Updates example for AI monitoring in response streaming

• Updates local testing newrelic_lambda_wrapper code

• Updates ubuntu runner

• Updates Extension build to avoid error /lib64/libc.so.6: version GLIBC_X.YZ not found.

• Bump axios from 1.7.7 to 1.8.2 in /examples/sam/containerized-lambda/nodejs-sam-example/hello-world

• Bump golang.org/x/net from 0.33.0 to 0.38.0

Notes

• Added example for New Relic AI monitoring, along with instrumentation of Lambda functions with response streaming

• Updated SAM examples to include latest layers and packages

• Updated Ruby Lambda instrumentation example

• Updated Readme to include NEW_RELIC_COLLECT_TRACE_ID environment variable which can be used to add trace-id to the Lambda logs

Fixed issues

• Resolved the issue where Extension inaccurately captured timeout durations for Lambda function timeout errors

• Updated sleep time to solve intermittent issue with unit test TestClientSendRetry

New feature

• Add trace.id to Lambda logs when the Lambda environment variable NEW_RELIC_COLLECT_TRACE_ID is set to true

Notes

• Add publish script for Extension only Lambda Layer, intended for local testing of Extension