AWS LAMBDA

Serverless Approaches have gained traction in the web application designing, developing and implementing sectors. Earlier, a lot of engineers treated serverless believed it to be another tech hype. Turns out, it was relatively similar, or even better than traditional and standalone virtual machines for hosting web-applications.

To date, we can see that startups tend to use serverless technology stack as a part of their systems, often even used for their core tenets and solutions to build products in different domains. In this blog, we breakdown AWS' serverless offering that is based on functions, called Amazon Lambda.

So, What is AWS' Lambda?

Lambda can be defined as a compute service that lets the service user run code without provisioning or managing servers. It executes your code only when needed and can scale automatically, from a few requests per day to thousands per second.

Serverless Applications and AWS Lambda

However, to understand the service that Lambda is, we need to first understand how serverless architectures function. Serverless applications are applications that do not use, nor require any servers for them to run. This gives benefits like no Operating System setup, scaling and patching as opposed to applications hosted on servers.

The AWS Lambda service is a high-scale, provision-free serverless compute offering which is based on functions. It is used only for the compute layer of a serverless application. The purpose of AWS Lambda is to build event-driven applications that can be triggered by several events in AWS.

In the case there are multiple simultaneous events, Lambda spins up multiple copies of the function to handle the events.Lambda can be described as a function as a service, and it has three components that make this statement apparent.

• A function: This is the actual code that performs the task.
• A configuration: This specifies how your function is executed.
• An event source (optional): This is the event that triggers the function. You can trigger with several AWS services or a third-party service.

Features of using AWS Lambda

• Users can run the applications either from the web or on a mobile platform.
• Lambda makes use of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) module to ensure that only the right users or groups get access to the application or function, ensuring security and visibility.
• Lambda speeds up the execution process and scales your application or code, by executing the events triggering a particular code.
• Developers don't have to focus on infrastructure to run an application, allowing them to focus on business logic.
• AWS Lambdas are scaled automatically. All you have to do is set a threshold for the concurrent invocation.
• Aside from the automatic scalability feature, AWS provides a basic set of tools for Lambdas which includes monitoring metrics like Memory Usage, Execution time or Errors Count, and a feature to customise your dashboard.
• Should a Lambda fail for any reason, it would be automatically re-invoked with the same event payload during the pre-configured period.

Use Cases

1. Netflix:?Netflix is one of the world's largest online media streaming providers delivering almost 7 billion hours of videos to nearly 50 million customers in 60 countries per quarter. The company is using AWS Lambda to build rule-based self-managing infrastructure and replace inefficient processes to reduce the rate of errors and save valuable time. Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product officer, explained how the company can use event-based triggers to help automate the encoding process of media files, the validation of backup completions and instance deployments at scale, and the monitoring of AWS resources used by the organization.

2. Bustle: Bustle is a news, entertainment, and fashion platform catering to women. Bustle started to use AWS Lambda to process high volumes of site metric data from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams in real time. This allows the team to get data more quickly so they can understand how new site features affect usage. They can also now measure user engagement, allowing better data-driven decisions. The serverless back end also supports the Romper (subsidiary of bustle) website and iOS app as well as the Bustle iOS app. Bustle plans to migrate all of Bustle.com to the serverless back end.

3. Guardian News and Media: They are a London-based global media company and publisher of the Guardian and the Observer newspapers. Developers do not have to be experts in workflow to use Lambda, and the developers who wrote the Lambda function can easily create the workflow. This allowed them to put more developers on projects, and this ultimately enabled the creation of more internal solutions that drive efficiency and productivity.

How can Ataloud help?

Connect with an Ataloud consultant today ([email protected]) for a seamless experience for your business' transition to the cloud. We can analyse, discuss and help validate your AWS billing and usage patterns, perform routine audits, perform log analysis, analyse and monitor performances- on top of the other managed services that we offer.