About Lambda

calendar Jun 15, 2024 · 2 min read · aws  ·
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(this post if part of the material I cover in my devops course)

AWS Lambda

What is Lambda?

  • AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service.
  • Use AWS Lambda to run code without provisioning or managing servers
  • You organize your code into Lambda functions.
    The Lambda service runs your function only when needed
  • Lambda runs your code on a high-availability compute infrastructure and performs all of the administration of the compute resources:
    • server and operating system maintenance
    • capacity provisioning
    • automatic scaling
    • logging
  • With Lambda, all you need to do is supply your code in one of the language runtimes that Lambda supports.
  • You only pay for the compute time that you consume—there is no charge when your code is not running.

Lambda Use-Cases

  • File processing (for example when files are loaded to S3)
  • Stream processing** (e.g use Lambda and with Amazon Kinesis to process real-time streaming data)
  • Web applications
    Combine Lambda with other AWS services to build powerful web applications.
  • IoT backends
    Build serverless backends using Lambda to handle web, mobile, IoT, and third-party API requests.
  • Mobile backends
    Build backends using Lambda and Amazon API Gateway to authenticate and process API requests.

When NOT to use Lambda

  • In cases where you have functions that manage, and mainly call other functions, your function is mainly waiting, so not optimal about costs.
    Consider using AWS Step Function
  • Don't use Lambda functions to jsut move data from one service to another.
    Use service integration to do that (e.g, between API Gateway and DynamoDB)
  • If your code should run longer than 15 minutes

AWS Lambda features