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AWS Lambda

Automatically run code in response to modifications to objects in Amazon S3 buckets, messages in Kinesis streams, or updates in DynamoDB

What is AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.
AWS Lambda is a tool in the Serverless / Task Processing category of a tech stack.

Who uses AWS Lambda?

Companies
2773 companies reportedly use AWS Lambda in their tech stacks, including Udemy, CRED, and Delivery Hero.

Developers
19752 developers on StackShare have stated that they use AWS Lambda.

AWS Lambda Integrations

Serverless, Amazon API Gateway, Contentful, Liquibase, and Buddy are some of the popular tools that integrate with AWS Lambda. Here's a list of all 92 tools that integrate with AWS Lambda.
Pros of AWS Lambda
129
No infrastructure
83
Cheap
70
Quick
59
Stateless
47
No deploy, no server, great sleep
12
AWS Lambda went down taking many sites with it
6
Event Driven Governance
6
Extensive API
6
Auto scale and cost effective
6
Easy to deploy
5
VPC Support
3
Integrated with various AWS services
Decisions about AWS Lambda

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose AWS Lambda in their tech stack.

Praveen Mooli
Engineering Manager at Taylor and Francis · | 18 upvotes · 3.2M views

We are in the process of building a modern content platform to deliver our content through various channels. We decided to go with Microservices architecture as we wanted scale. Microservice architecture style is an approach to developing an application as a suite of small independently deployable services built around specific business capabilities. You can gain modularity, extensive parallelism and cost-effective scaling by deploying services across many distributed servers. Microservices modularity facilitates independent updates/deployments, and helps to avoid single point of failure, which can help prevent large-scale outages. We also decided to use Event Driven Architecture pattern which is a popular distributed asynchronous architecture pattern used to produce highly scalable applications. The event-driven architecture is made up of highly decoupled, single-purpose event processing components that asynchronously receive and process events.

To build our #Backend capabilities we decided to use the following: 1. #Microservices - Java with Spring Boot , Node.js with ExpressJS and Python with Flask 2. #Eventsourcingframework - Amazon Kinesis , Amazon Kinesis Firehose , Amazon SNS , Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda 3. #Data - Amazon RDS , Amazon DynamoDB , Amazon S3 , MongoDB Atlas

To build #Webapps we decided to use Angular 2 with RxJS

#Devops - GitHub , Travis CI , Terraform , Docker , Serverless

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When adding a new feature to Checkly rearchitecting some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda . The short story:

  • Developer Experience trumps everything.
  • AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impact not only your wallet.
  • If you need geographic spread, AWS is lonely at the top.
The setup

Recently, I was doing a brainstorm at a startup here in Berlin on the future of their infrastructure. They were ready to move on from their initial, almost 100% Ec2 + Chef based setup. Everything was on the table. But we crossed out a lot quite quickly:

  • Pure, uncut, self hosted Kubernetes — way too much complexity
  • Managed Kubernetes in various flavors — still too much complexity
  • Zeit — Maybe, but no Docker support
  • Elastic Beanstalk — Maybe, bit old but does the job
  • Heroku
  • Lambda

It became clear a mix of PaaS and FaaS was the way to go. What a surprise! That is exactly what I use for Checkly! But when do you pick which model?

I chopped that question up into the following categories:

  • Developer Experience / DX 🤓
  • Ops Experience / OX 🐂 (?)
  • Cost 💵
  • Lock in 🔐

Read the full post linked below for all details

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Arthur Boghossian
DevOps Engineer at PlayAsYouGo · | 3 upvotes · 125.4K views

For our Compute services, we decided to use AWS Lambda as it is perfect for quick executions (perfect for a bot), is serverless, and is required by Amazon Lex, which we will use as the framework for our bot. We chose Amazon Lex as it integrates well with other #AWS services and uses the same technology as Alexa. This will give customers the ability to purchase licenses through their Alexa device. We chose Amazon DynamoDB to store customer information as it is a noSQL database, has high performance, and highly available. If we decide to train our own models for license recommendation we will either use Amazon SageMaker or Amazon EC2 with AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and AWS ASG as they are ideal for model training and inference.

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Deep Shah
Software Engineer at Amazon · | 6 upvotes · 895K views

I only know Java and so thinking of building a web application in the following order. I need some help on what alternatives I can choose. Open to replace components, services, or infrastructure.

  • Frontend: AngularJS, Bootstrap
  • Web Framework: Spring Boot
  • Database: Amazon DynamoDB
  • Authentication: Auth0
  • Deployment: Amazon EC2 Container Service
  • Local Testing: Docker
  • Marketing: Mailchimp (Separately Export from Auth0)
  • Website Domain: GoDaddy
  • Routing: Amazon Route 53

PS: Open to exploring options of going completely native ( AWS Lambda, AWS Security but have to learn all)

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Needs advice
on
AWS LambdaAWS Lambda
and
DockerDocker

I am building an API that can be achieved from either.

It's a simple CRUD API.

Is there a well-known public API in production by a known company powered by AWS Lambda?

I see that everybody uses containers instead.

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I planned to do a project in Cloud Firestore, which will store about 100GB of data. Shall I go for Cloud Firestore or traditional AWS RDS MS-SQL SERVER with AWS Lambda? Please I need your suggestion.

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Blog Posts

GitHubPythonNode.js+47
54
72066
GitHubDockerAmazon EC2+23
12
6531
JavaScriptGitHubPython+42
53
21456

AWS Lambda's Features

  • Extend other AWS services with custom logic
  • Build custom back-end services
  • Completely Automated Administration
  • Built-in Fault Tolerance
  • Automatic Scaling
  • Integrated Security Model
  • Bring Your Own Code
  • Pay Per Use
  • Flexible Resource Model

AWS Lambda Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to AWS Lambda?
Serverless
Build applications comprised of microservices that run in response to events, auto-scale for you, and only charge you when they run. This lowers the total cost of maintaining your apps, enabling you to build more logic, faster. The Framework uses new event-driven compute services, like AWS Lambda, Google CloudFunctions, and more.
Azure Functions
Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.
AWS Step Functions
AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function lets you scale and change applications quickly.
Google App Engine
Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.
See all alternatives

AWS Lambda's Followers
17970 developers follow AWS Lambda to keep up with related blogs and decisions.