AWS LAMBDA
By Qrious Tech Team LLP
“AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing
servers,” AWS states on the Lambda product page. You can think of
Lambda as an event-driven computing platform; Lambda runs when
triggered by an event and executes code that’s been loaded into
the system.
For example, a simple use case would be that every time an image
is uploaded into Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), a Lambda
function could automatically resize the image. The Seattle Times
uses this to automatically resize images for mobile, tablet and
desktop devices. The event that triggers the Lambda function is
the file being uploaded to S3. Lambda then executes the function
of resizing the image. One key to Lambda is that customers only
pay for the service when functions are executed. So, the Seattle
Times only pays AWS when an image has been resized.
Wood said Lambda could be helpful in analytics too. When an online
order is placed on Zillow, an entry is made into Amazon DynamoDB
NoSQL database. That entry into the database triggers a Lambda
function to load the order information into Amazon Redshift, the
data warehouse. Analytics programs can be run ontop of data stored
in Redshift.
This is ushering in a new era of application architecture. There’s
a particular category of usage where the developer wants to focus
primarily on adding functionality to their application, they don’t
want to worry about scaling up and down (infrastructure), and they
want costs that run in line with usage of their application, not
the utilization of their infrastructure. Lambda provides a really
good answer for developers looking for that sort of focus.
Amazon uses Lambda internally. Lambda is the computing platform
for AWS’s Internet of Things service and the Amazon Echo. Amazon
CloudWatch events allow users to automatically trigger a patch of
an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machine instance if
it fails.
But perhaps what is most interesting about Lambda is that it could
threaten one of Amazon’s most popular services: EC2, its virtual
machine service. Developers can build apps that run entirely on
Lambda functions instead of spinning up EC2 VMs. Amazon may be
out-innovating itself with Lambda.
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