The Next Big Thing in Serverless — AWS Lamda

Run code in response to events

2 min readFeb 28, 2021

Overview

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that executes provided code on fully managed infrastructure. It is classified as a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), which means that everything, except your code, is managed for you.

That enables the many benefits:

Automatic Scaling
Billed for Executing Code; Not Billed for Idle Time
Built-in Fault Tolerance

Serverless

Serverless computing allows you to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers.with this type of computing your application is still running on servers, but all server management is done by AWS.

Better Availability
Better Performance
No Manual Scaling
No Patching
No Wasted Capacity

https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/faqs/

Configuration

Layers

Additional code that can be loaded into your function without the need to package that code along with your deployment package. This can be really useful if you have a lot of functions that rely on the same dependencies.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/configuration-layers.html

Memory

Controls the amount of memory a function can use.
The value must be between 128 and 10240 MB.

CPU scales proportional to memory

Timeout

Controls the amount of time a function can execute for.
The value must be less than 15 minutes.

long-running processes are not suited for Lambda

Invocation

Streaming

Language Support

Lambda supports most popular programming languages natively, but still provides the ability to use any language by configuring a Runtime API or packaging your code as a Container.