What is AWS Lambda and How Can it Benefit Your Software Development Company?

What is AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda is a serverless and even-driven cloud-based compute service by Amazon Web Services (AWS). This means it runs code in response to events and scales itself without zero administration.

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that removes the burden of provisioning and managing servers. Instead of focusing on infrastructure, businesses can concentrate solely on development.

Unlike traditional models, Lambda offers a different approach to deployment. Instead of deploying applications, developers write functions that serve as the primary unit of Lambda. These functions can be used for various tasks or triggered by events, becoming the building blocks of serverless applications.

Benefits of using Lambda

AWS Lambda is renowned for its cost efficiency, exceptional scalability, security, and top-notch performance. Here are some of the key advantages you can expect to experience with Lambda.

Automatic Scaling and Security

Businesses are freed from server management overhead, while developers can focus on development without the burden of patching and security concerns. AWS Lambda leverages AWS security mechanisms, offering a significant advantage.

As a cloud platform, Lambda automatically scales itself based on the powerful infrastructure developed by AWS. This means it can handle any level of throughput, even thousands of requests per second, making it a renowned tool among large companies.

Easy to Get Started

Lambda is ideal for companies seeking to avoid complex operational burdens. Developers simply upload a ZIP file or container image containing their code, and Lambda automatically allocates the necessary resources to run it, instantaneously scaling up or down to meet demand.

Cost-effective

Pay-per-use is another major benefit that ensures you only pay for what you use. This transparent model eliminates unnecessary charges and guarantees you don't pay for resources you're not utilizing.

Highly performant

Lambda offers outstanding performance, and you can further optimize it by provisioning more memory. Additionally, Amazon is continuously working on new infrastructure that will significantly reduce its costs.

The Hidden Costs of Convenience: AWS Lambda's Cons

While trading away some control for peace of mind, Lambda may not offer the deepest level of control. This dependence on AWS and lack of transparency into the underlying infrastructure can be a double-edged sword.

While it provides convenience and eliminates maintenance overhead, it also limits your visibility and flexibility. Whether this is a pro or con depends on your individual needs and priorities.

Use Cases of AWS Lambda

Here are some of the most common use cases for Lambda:

Interactive Mobile & Web Backends:

You can use it to build highly responsive and scalable backends for mobile and web applications. This is because Lambda functions can be triggered by events such as user actions, API requests, or changes in data stored in Amazon S3 or DynamoDB.

What is more? It seamlessly integrates with other AWS services. This provides an option to migrate other services to the cloud and build a robust platform that can withstand high traffic and load by leveraging the power of AWS infrastructure.

Machine Learning

AWS lambda is an excellent solution for developing AI-powered applications, as these applications require a powerful computing infrastructure capable of handling extensive data.

This platform is ideal for tasks such as cleaning, transforming, and preparing data. Lambda can also handle infrastructure management to simplify scaling with the Amazon File Elastic System.

For businesses seeking a battle-tested platform to enable the development of futuristic applications, they can leverage this platform without starting from scratch.

Additionally, it can be used to run inference on trained machine learning models, allowing you to generate insights and predictions at scale. Lambda can also be used to automate and orchestrate complex machine-learning workflows with other AWS services.

Large-Scale Data Processing

Lambda can be used to process massive datasets efficiently. This includes tasks such as stream processing, batch processing, and data transformation. Lambda’s automatic scaling and pay-per-use model ensures that you only pay for the compute time you use.

In addition, Lambda’s event-driven nature allows you to react to events from sources such as S3, DynamoDB, and API Gateway. This allows you to build event-driven applications that are responsive and scalable.

Event-Driven Applications

Lambda can be used to build event-driven applications. This means that your application can react to events from sources such as S3, DynamoDB, and API Gateway. This allows your application to be responsive and scalable.

In addition, Lambda’s decoupled microservices architecture allows you to build applications that are easy to maintain and scale. This is because microservices are small, independent services that can be deployed and scaled independently.

Companies Using AWS Lambda

This computing service is behind big-shot companies worldwide. Netflix, one of the largest streaming service providers, with nearly 50 million users across the globe, uses AWS Lambda in its infrastructure. Some popular companies are Airbnb, Capital One, The Coca-Cola Company, and many others.

Conclusion

While Lambda is a powerful tool, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. It excels in handling short-lived, event-driven tasks, not long-running processes. This powerful tool seamlessly scales to meet your precise needs, instantly increasing capacity or scaling down to zero when idle.

It liberates you from manual server provisioning, workload-aware cluster scaling, event integrations, and runtime management, empowering you to focus on your core business.

Do you think AWS Lambda is a great fit for your organization? Are you ready to migrate to this powerful cloud ecosystem?

Contact us today to get started on your cloud journey.

With a team of certified AWS developers and as a member of the AWS Partner Network program, we possess extensive knowledge and expertise in AWS services and solutions. We can support any use case across your entire customer lifecycle.

FAQs

What is a serverless compute system?

Serverless compute systems eliminate the need for provisioning and managing servers, making them a valuable tool for companies that find scaling their IT infrastructure challenging and are looking for a platform that can scale automatically as their businesses grow. This serverless architecture enables businesses to offload their server-related tasks to service providers.

What is event-driven?

With event-driven architecture, the service typically runs only when triggered by events, eliminating the need for constantly running servers. This translates to costs incurred only for the actual processing time, significantly reducing expenditure compared to traditional always-on cloud infrastructure.

What languages does AWS Lambda support?

While AWS Lambda natively supports Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python, and Ruby, its reach extends far beyond these seven languages. With its Runtime API, it allows you to use any programming language to author your functions.

Which companies are using AWS lambda? 

From tech giants like Netflix and Uber to financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase and Capital One, organizations are leveraging AWS lambda in their infrastructure.

How do I migrate to AWS Lambda? 

When migrating your existing data to AWS Lambda, consider engaging a certified company that provides AWS development services. This ensures a smooth migration, from assessing your application to creating a migration plan and optimizing your deployment.

Brilworks is renowned for its cloud development services and is a certified AWS partner. If you are considering moving to the cloud, you can reach out to us.