What is AWS Lambda in Simple Terms?

One of the most popular cloud services is Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has a wide range of offerings. One of the most exciting of these services is AWS Lambda. In this article/video, we will explain what AWS Lambda is in simple terms.

What’s AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda is a computing service which allows you to run your code without provisioning or managing servers. Quick side note. In the past, if you wanted to run web-based technology, you had to have a server sitting in a data center somewhere running your application.

Early on, it was bare metal, so you actually owned the piece of hardware in the rack. Later, it evolved to virtual machines or VMs, which you could rent from a cloud provider, but each machine had to be operated, configured, and managed, so they developed containers which could easily spin up and run on a new server. You had to pay for uptime, for operations, monitoring, and maintenance.

In serverless architecture, you don’t worry about or pay for any of that. You only pay for the compute time that you consume. This can make it a cost-effective solution for running code in the cloud.

How AWS Lambda Works

AWS Lambda is event-driven, meaning that it executes your code in response to events. The Lambda is like a little container and you put a single piece of business logic code into the lambda. When the event that you specify happens, it triggers the Lambda, the Lambda runs the code inside it, and then shuts itself off.

For example, you are using your favorite social media app. You want to post something to share with your friends. When you tap the post button, it triggers a Lambda that takes the data you wanted to post, stores it in the database, and publishes it to your friends. Then the Lambda stops computing. Since Lambdas are event-driven, you can use them in a variety of event settings to build chatbots, process IoT data, and perform image and video analysis. It literally is code running on-demand instead of a server running all the time. 

Supported Programming Languages

You can use multiple programming languages in a Lambda, including Node.js, Python, Java, Go, Ruby, and C#. This makes it easy to build and deploy your code in the language of your choice. According to the DataDog 2022 State of Serverless report, Python and Node.js are the dominant programming languages among Lambda users.

Integration With Other AWS Cloud Services

AWS Lambda also integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon API Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon S3. You can check out some of our other articles and videos about how it works with these other services. Check out the links below. 

AWS Lambda Auto Scaling

One of the benefits of AWS Lambda is that it scales automatically. It can handle a few requests per day or millions of requests per second. You don’t need to worry about provisioning or managing servers, since there are no servers to provision. In fact, you are transferring the burden of scaling from yourself to the cloud provider, in this case, AWS. 

Times are changing, and so it how we architect and build software. AWS Lambda is the forerunner among serverless computing services. It allows you to run your code without provisioning or managing servers. It is event-driven and supports multiple programming languages. With automatic scaling and high availability, AWS Lambda is a cost-effective solution for running code in the cloud. What do you think is the future of AWS Lambda? Leave your comments below. 

To learn more, visit our AWS Cloud Engineering Services page!