AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows us to run code in response to events without having to manage servers. This means we can focus on writing our code, while AWS handles the underlying infrastructure.
Key features of AWS Lambda:
- Serverless: You don’t need to provision or manage servers.
- Event-driven: Our code is triggered by events, such as changes to data in an S3 bucket, messages in an SQS queue, or API calls.
- Scalability: AWS Lambda automatically scales our functions to handle varying workloads, ensuring our applications can handle peak traffic.
- High availability: Our functions are distributed across multiple availability zones, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance.
- Pay-per-use pricing: You only pay for the compute time our functions consume, making it a cost-effective solution for many use cases.
Common use cases of AWS Lambda:
- Data processing: Processing data from S3, DynamoDB, or other data sources.
- Web and mobile backends: Building APIs and real-time applications.
- Image and video processing: Resizing, cropping, and converting images and videos.
- Machine learning: Deploying and running machine learning models.
- IoT applications: Processing data from IoT devices.
How AWS Lambda works:
- Create a function: You write our code in one of the supported languages (e.g., Python, Node.js, Java, C#, Go) and upload it to AWS Lambda.
- Configure a trigger: You define the events that will trigger our function, such as changes to an S3 bucket or API calls.
- AWS Lambda executes our code: When an event occurs, AWS Lambda automatically provisions the necessary compute resources and executes our code.
- Results are returned: Our function can return results, which can be used to trigger other actions or send notifications.
AWS Lambda is a powerful and flexible tool that can be used to build a wide range of applications. It’s a great choice for developers who want to focus on building applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.