• Contents:

AWS Lambda 101

• 🔧 Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)
  • Short-lived compute functions

Comparison with EC2

• Amazon EC2
  • Virtual Servers in the Cloud
  • Limited by RAM and CPU
  • Continuously running
  • Scaling means intervention to add/remove servers
• Amazon Lambda
  • Virtual functions – no servers to manage! → serverless
  • Limited by time – short executions (up to 15 mins)
    • 💡 Not intended for long-running, stateful applications
  • Run on-demand
  • Scaling is automated!

Benefits of AWS Lambda

• Easy Pricing:
  • Pay per request/invocation and compute time
  • Free tier → each month includes for free:
    • 1 million requests/invocations
    • 400k GB-seconds of compute time
  • Additional reading: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/
  • 💡 It is usually very cheap to run AWS Lambda so it’s very popular
• Easy to get more resources per functions (up to 10GB of RAM!)
  • Increasing RAM also improves CPU and NW!
• Integration with whole AWS suite of services
  • e.g. Easy monitoring through AWS CloudWatch
• Event-Driven: functions get invoked by AWS when needed
• Supports many programming languages
  • Node.js (JavaScript), Python, Java, C# (.NET Core)/Powershell, Ruby
  • Custom Runtime API (community supported, example Rust or Golang)
• Supports Lambda container images
  • The container image must implement the Lambda Runtime API
  • ‼️ ECS/Fargate preferred for running arbitrary Docker images!

Examples

Serverless Thumbnail creation

Serverless CRON job