Recently, Amazon launched a new service called Lambda. It’s a stateless event-driven compute service meant for dynamic applications and it does not require provisioning of any compute infrastructure.
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What change Lambda will bring about?
Users want to concentrate on their unique application logic and business requirements rather than on the heavy lifting of provisioning and scaling servers, maintaining software stacks, managing fleet-wide deployments, or handling web service front ends. Consequently, Amazon came up with an easy solution to run applications that does not require managing the underlying infrastructure or compromising with the flexibility of the code and the solution is AWS Lambda.
Minimize Development EffortAmazon Web Service’s Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels, pointed out that Lambda will make building and delivering applications much easier thereby enabling programmers to reduce their overall development effort. They can simply create the code and define the event triggers. It will then be executed automatically when the conditions are met. This automation will save time to get a job done and involved money as instead of running the whole stack, you can now run it without any resources.
Support creation of dynamic applicationsOne of the most exciting features of Lambda is that it helps in the development of dynamic, event-driven applications in the cloud. Lambda is being launched in association with a new Amazon S3 feature called event notifications that triggers events as and when the objects are added or changed in a bucket. Also, the recently launched Amazon DynamoDB Streams feature generates events whenever a table is updated. Thus, developers have an option to attach code to Amazon S3 buckets or Amazon DynamoDB tables; and the code will run automatically whenever any changes are made to the buckets or tables. Developers don’t have to worry about being over or under capacity now. Lambda functions help keeping the rates low as they scale to match the event rate and run only when required.
Lambda in a nutshell
Lambda has come here to offer a lot. It will take care of managing, scaling and monitoring. Just milliseconds after an event is triggered, it will be processed through stateless cloud functions. Not only this, thousands of these events can run in parallel.
The service is designed to follow the basic programming principles of function, data and interactions. As of now, the service only supports Java Script/node, but as suggested by Vogel, more languages will be added in the near future.
You need to provide the context and the associated resources after you create your function. Whenever the resource will change, it will trigger the function and it will be executed automatically without any interruption.
