AWS Lambda Overview¶

Why AWS Lambda¶

• Amazon EC2
  • Virtual Servers in the Cloud
  • Limited by RAM and CPU
  • Continously running
  • Scaling means intervention to add / remove servers
• Amazon Lambda
  • Virtual functions - no servers to manage
  • Limited by time - short executions
  • Run on-demand
  • Scaling is automated

Benefits of AWS Lambda¶

• Easy pricing
  • Pay per request and compute time
  • Free tier of 1,000,000 AWS Lambda requests and 400,000 GBs of compute time
• Integrated with the whole AWS suite of services
• Integrated with many programming languages
• Easy monitoring through AWS CloudWatch
• Easy to get more resources per functions (up to 10GB of RAM)
• Increasing RAM will also improve CPU and network

AWS Lambda language support¶

• Node.js (JavaScript)
• Python
• Java (Java 8 compatible)
• C# (.NET Core)
• Golang
• C# / Powershell
• Ruby

• Custom Runtime API (community supported, example Rust)

• Lambda Container Image

  • The container image must implement the Lambda Runtime API
  • ECS / Fargate is preferred for running arbitrary Docker images
  • Important: Docker is not for AWS LAmbda, it's for ECS / Fargate

AWS Lambda Integrations¶

The main ones are: - API Gateway - Kinesis - DynamoDB - S3 - CloudFront - CloudWatch Events / EventBridge - CloudWatch Logs - SNS - SQS - Cognito

but there are way more

Example - thumbnail creation with serverless¶

Example - serverless CRON job¶

AWS Lambda Pricing: example¶

• You can find overall pricing information here: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/
• Pay per calls:
  • First 1,000,000 requests are free
  • $0.20 per 1 million requests thereafter (0.0000002 per request)
• Pay per duration (in iincrement of 1ms)
  • 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month is FREE
  • 400,000 seconds if function is 1GB RAM
  • 3,200,000 seconds if function is 128MB RAM
  • After that $1.00 for 600,000 GB-seconds
• It is usually very cheap to run AWS Lambda so it's very popular