What Is Lambda Architecture? (for dummies)

Taavi Rehemägi

September 18th, 2018

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From ancient Rome and Greece throughout Latin America and Egypt, there is only one thing besides the history itself that kept those ancient times alive even today – the architecture. The most important part of any era in our immersive history was the building of magnificent objects all around the world. These objects, even today, are some of the many wonders of the world. This time, in our era, we will talk about modern, computing architecture that will hopefully leave its trace in the upcoming millennia by building our world into a significantly better future.

AWS Lambda Serverless Architecture

By using serverless architecture, you’ll be able to build and run any applications and services with no need to handle the infrastructure whatsoever. Your applications will still run on servers but know that AWS is taking control over the server management, which allows you to free yourself from scaling, provisioning, and maintaining servers that run your applications, storage systems, and databases.

The Benefits

AWS Lambda serverless architecture will bring many benefits to your business. For example, your developers can put their focus on the main product instead of thinking about operating and managing servers or runtimes. It doesn’t matter if the managing takes place in the cloud or you need to be physically in the office. The point is that it is very time and energy-consuming work, and by using serverless architecture, the hustle is gone. By saving their time this way, developers are much more relaxed and have much more time and energy, as well as focus set upon developing amazing products which scale and are very much reliable. The main three benefits are:

• No Server Management – meaning that there isn’t any particular software or runtime that needs to be installed, maintained, or administered.
• Flexible Scaling allows your application to be automatically scaled or scaled by adjustment of its capacity through toggling the units of consumption rather than units of a single server.
• Automated High Availability means that serverless applications have already built-in availability and fault tolerance. There is no need whatsoever to architect for these capabilities because the services that run the app will provide them by default.

As a civilization, we strive to make everything simpler, therefore should focus on important things like building beautiful and astonishing structures, whether they’re physical objects like the pyramids or some essential applications we need in our everyday lives.

AWS Lambda Serverless Architecture Use Cases

AWS Lambda serverless architecture is made for anyone and everyone. We’ll mention some of the massive and famous companies that switched on using serverless architecture for their own gain, and of course, to make things run much faster, smoother, and more comfortable. Some of these companies might be new for you, but some of them you already know:

• The Coca-Cola Company decided they need a cost-effective serverless solution, so they’ve used AWS Lambda to build it. They needed something to support their “Coke.com Vending Pass Program.” This program gives away drink rewards that people can earn by purchasing products at vending machines which are equipped with supporting mobile payments by using the Coca-Cola Vending Pass. Users would use the NFC option on their smartphones to complete an Android Pay or Apple Pay purchase, and that would lead to identifying themselves to the vending machine which would then give them free credits for future vending machine purchases they make. To read all about the details of this use case, click here.
• Localytics needed the support of pipelines with many billions of data points that are uploaded daily from mobile apps that run on Localytics analytics software. To enable the engineering team to create new services, they needed access to subsets of the data. All of this meant that they would require additional capacity planning, monitoring, and utilization as well as infrastructure management. They’ve found the solution with AWS Lambda which they use to send around 100 billion data points every month. Those billions of data points go from the Elastic Load Balancing to Amazon Simple Queue Service, and after that to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and at the end to Amazon Kinesis stream. Learn more about the challenges Localytics had as well as the solutions they’ve found by following this link.
• Netflix is the biggest online video streaming company in the world, and their use of AWS Lambda changed their gameplay forever. Netflix plans on using AWS Lambda for building the rule-based self-managing infrastructure to be able to replace the inefficient processes which would then reduce the rate of errors, and of course, save time. To learn more about the AWS Lambda use case by Netflix, watch the video in which Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer at Netflix explains in detail how AWS Lambda helped in achieving their goals.

Wrapping up

To create is to build, and to build is to leave a trace behind yourself. Our ancestors left many paths for us to follow, and in the future (or in THE NOW) it is up to us to leave something for the future generations.

Let us know in our comment section below if you have any doubts, questions, ideas, or any of the sort that you’d like to discuss, and feel free to visit our blog. We’ll keep you informed and posted about any upcoming news.

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