The Lambda AWS serverless services is a compute service that enables users execute code without having to manage or provision servers. The Lambda technology constitutes of a high-availability compute infrastructure for running your code. It performs all the code execution related tasks including:
- Compute resource administration including maintaining servers and OSs.
- Automatic scaling
- Capacity provisioning
- Logging
Lambda lets you execute code for almost all types of backend services and applications. With the Lambda AWS serverless services all you need to provide from your end is the actual software app code in one of the many programming languages that Lambda supports.
With Lambda it becomes easy for developers to organize your code into Lambda functions. Lambda executes functions on-demand and has automatic scaling functionality. It can run functions that require anything from a few requests daily to thousands of requests each second. AWS gives you the great flexibility of paying only for the computing time you use and you don’t need to pay for dormant functions i.e. when it is not being executed.
Top Use Cases
The Lambda AWS serverless services is best for following use cases:
- Require scaling data processing.
- Maintain interactive mobile and web backends.
- Get the power of ML enabled insights.
- Create event-driven apps!
Some prominent and relevant uses of AWS Lambda are in:
Fast document conversion:
People who are dealing with documents and sending them between parties are only too aware of the problem posed by the plethora of document formats out there. Certain formats are more useful to certain people according to the needs of the moment and the person concerned. HTML, DOC and PDF formats are the leading formats, but they are best used on different apps and platforms. Though people do have
the option of preparing documents in multiple formats before sending all of them, but this is something that takes up a LOT of storage space.
This problem is effectively solved by AWS Lambda that comes with the ability to retrieve documents fast irrespective of the format before converting and coming up with a document format well suited for the user who can then choose to download it or display it.
Processing video
People who store video files on S3 buckets know how instances can poll buckets on a regular basis. The bucket remains idle till new files are uploaded before it can download and process it and finally push it back to the origin server.
If your app or service is not that popular, in this model you might have idle instances wasting our precious resources for most of the day. You are
paying for 24*7 availability of resources even when no new videos are added for an entire day.
Such problems too are addressed by AWS Lambda which allows you to upload custom scripts written in programming languages like JavaScript, Java, Python etc. Such scripts would contain code that trigger events on uploading of new video files into the bucket and then only use compute resources to process it and push it back to the origin server.
Features:
Some of the standout features of AWS Lambda include:
- Use custom logic to extend use of other services offered by AWS
- Create custom backend services.
- Use existing code you or your developer team created themselves.
- Make administration fully automated.
- Significant fault-tolerance
- Pack functions as container images before deploying them.
- Scale automatically
- Connect to relational databases.
- Exert fine-grain control over performance.
- Connect to shared file systems.
- Execute code as per requests from Amazon CloudFront
- Orchestrate multiple functions.
- It comes with an integrated security model.
- Provides integrity and trust controls.
- Pay for use pricing.
- Flexible resource model
- Integrate the technology with the operational tools of your choice.
- Get 34% more price performance efficiency thanks to Graviton2.
Programming Languages Supported by AWS Lambda:
Till yet, Lambda does not provide universal programming language support but nonetheless it does support almost all of the major programming languages and runtimes like AWS lambda java. It also supports:
- Python 2.7
- Python 3.6
- Python 3.7
- Python 3.8
- js 8.10
- js 10.x
- js 12.x
- Java 8 – including JVM-based languages.
- Java 11
- C# — .NET Core 1.0
- C# — .NET Core 2.1
- Ruby 2.5
Developers and businesses can use all of the above-mentioned programming languages in either of the Amazon Linux or Amazon Linux 2 OS environment. AWS further provides dedicated SDKs for each language thereby making the work of writing Lambda functions and integrate them seamlessly with other AWS services easy and simple.
Amazon is also preparing Lambda support for a few other programming languages including:
- C++
- Rust 1.31
You can also create custom runtimes for your Lambda functions.
Advantages of using AWS Lambda
There are a great number of advantages of using AWS Lambda which include the following:
- Lambda cost is low.
- Offers Automatic Scalability
- Great variety in and effectiveness of use cases especially like S3 object processing and chatbots
- Facilitates swift iterative development.
- Requires minimal Operational Management
- Let’s you Consolidate Functionality
- Provide Industry-Leading Customer Service
AWS Lambda Expertise:
iSummation has an expert pool of in-house Lambda experts who have decades of collective experience in both AWS and Lambda technologies. Partner with us to get cost-effective, efficient apps using the lambda technology on the AWS platform!