AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service which comes under Amazon Web Services. In this post, we are going to shed some light on AWS Lambda including how it ties into serverless architecture.
Understanding serverless
Before understanding what AWS Lambda is, let us first understand what is serverless architecture? Serverless applications are applications that do not require any provisioning of servers to run. In such serverless applications, there is no worry about OS setup, patching, or scaling of servers which are important factors to consider while running your application on a physical server.
Characteristics of Serverless applications or platforms:
- No server management
- Flexible scaling
- No idle capacity
- High availability
Describing AWS Lambda
It is a serverless compute service of Amazon Web Services. It operates on the FaaS (Function-as-a-service) model. With such services, developers can focus on building applications without worrying about managing the application. It requires zero administration, yes you read it right!
When you upload a code to AWS Lambda, the service runs code itself, scales about the infrastructure to always ensure application performance and availability.
The code which runs on AWS Lambda is referred to as the lambda function. Lambda function supports various programming languages, such as –
- Java
- Python
- C #
- Node.js
- Go
- PowerShell
- Ruby
Features of AWS Lambda
- It offers different options such as Amazon S3 services, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CodeCommit, and many more to trigger events.
- It can easily scale the infrastructure without the burden of additional configurations. It also helps developers to minimize operational work related to system infrastructure.
- No requirement of upfront costs. Pay only for the memory used by the lambda function and the minimum cost for the number of requests. Thus, AWS Lambda is a cost-effective option for users.
- It uses AWS IAM to define all security roles and policies to ensure the security of users’ applications.
- You won’t need to worry about the downtime of the app since AWS Lambda provides fault tolerance for services running code and functions.
AWS Lambda Example showing Media Transformation
Cross-device development is a major concern for application development. Facilitating this comes at a higher cost and manual tasks which hinders the efficiency of development teams.
But with AWS Lambda, by developing a multi-platform media and content delivery pipeline, you can solve and automate this problem.
For example, whenever a user requests for an image which is unavailable in the Amazon S3 bucket, the user’s browser follows the redirect and requests the image resize through Amazon API Gateway.
At this point, the Lambda function is triggered which fetches the original image from the S3 bucket, resizes it and uploads it back along with the corresponding requested key.
The best example is Netflix with its 70 billion hours of content in a quarter to nearly 60 million customer base. Netflix uses AWS Lambda examples of media transform to facilitate their media files in more than 50 different formats.
They are also leveraging it to build a self-sufficient automated infrastructure to replace inefficient processes to reduce the error rates and valuable time.
Conclusion
To conclude, AWS Lambda has highly specific use cases with a bunch of some prerequisites. The different best practices for security and compliance in Lambda are similar to other AWS services, but some are particular to Lambda. When you think about your next implementation, consider what you learned about AWS Lambda, and how it can improve your next workload solution.
If you need help understanding the AWS Lambda in more depth or require assistance in implementation, Being a trusted AWS partner, enreap experts can help you! Get in touch with us to know more.
