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Lambda Introduction

With a Lambda-based application, you have:

  • Data Centers
  • Hardware
  • Assembly Code/Protocols
  • High-Level Languages
  • Operating Systems
  • Application Layer/AWS APIs
  • AWS Lambda

With Lambda, you can abstract out all of the former layers and just worry about your code.

AWS Lambda is a compute service where you can upload your code and create a Lambda function. AWS Lambda takes care of provisioning and managing the servers that you use to run the code. You don't have to worry about OSs, patching, scaling, etc. You can use Lambda in the following ways:

  • As an event-driven compute service, where AWS Lambda runs your code in response to events. These events could be changes to data in an AWS S3 bucket or an AWS DynamoDB table.
  • As a compute service to run your code in response to HTTP requests using AWS API Gateway or API calls made using AWS SDKs.

Lambda Supported Languages

  • Node.js
  • Java
  • Python
  • C#
  • GO

Lambda Pricing

  • Number of requests
    • First 1 million requests are free. $0.20 per 1 million requests thereafter.
  • Duration
    • Duration is calculated from the time your code begins executing until it returns or otherwise terminates, rounded up to the nearest 100ms. The price depends on the amount of memory you allocate to your function. You are charged $0.00001667 for every GB-second used.

What makes Lambda Cool

  • No Servers
  • Continuous Scaling
  • Extremely cheap (A Cloud Guru is < $1 / month for Lambda)
  • Amazon Echo uses Lambda