AWS - Lambda Essentials

Ever since the cloud taken over the IT departments in organizations, serverless technology evolved and Lambda from AWS played a critical role in it. While serverless is a big topic and generic word, AWS Lambda offers some excellent benefits in terms of building scalable and robust business applications.

Lambda, simply put, provides an on-demand compute with zero infrastructure setup. You can use it to create long-running processes and provide best possible digital experiences for your users without incurring additional costs. Today, even a small web application contains atleast one lambda function to take care of a task that cannot be handled in your regular request-response cycle of web applications.

Lets look at 10 notable benefits of using AWS Lambda

1. Supports variety of run times for different use cases. Based on your team’s preference, use Java, JS (node), Python, Go etc.
2. Integrates well with other services like API Gateway to simplify the triggering process.
3. Provides flexible networking configuration including private subnets. For example, you want to make sure your lambda access your DB that lives in private subnet, you can configure it to do so.
4. Supports Docker runtime. This is an amazing feature that allows you to run any code in Lambda.
5. Extensive scaling options using reserved capacity and concurrency etc.
6. Integrated monitoring with CloudWatch by default, which makes it a no-brainer for adding logging for your code without a lot of complex infra setup.
7. Docker runtime supports integration with docker registry provided by AWS, which makes it easy to run your app code and lambda code with the same image. A great way to get started with background processing.
8. Full-blown CI/CD support. Upload the code in zip folder or package it as an image and deploy with CodeBuild, awesome.
9. Use layers for more advanced packaging of the serverless code. This helps you create your own runtime or support other dependencies.
10. Last but not least, use Step Functions to create an orchestrated lambda functions to run your entire business processes or workflow.

Conclusion.

As you can see, these notable feature makes Lambda a most widely-adapted service to create more resilient and high-available applications.

Watch out for the video sections for DeepDive into the Lambda related content.

Thank you for reading.