AWS Lambda Frequently Asked Questions For Dummies

Since a book series called “… for Dummies” was launched, people have finally come to realize how much they don’t know about the particular area they thought they previously knew about.

We’ve all started from somewhere. Self-learning, learning at school or even in the office at our jobs. A breakthrough was achieved when we realized that something absolutely strange to us, became quite familiar.

Learning something new and unfamiliar is slow and a cumbersome process, but it comes with great benefits in the end. The mentioned series of books “… for Dummies” (whether it’s Excel for Dummies or Windows for Dummies, etc.) gave us all of the answers to the questions we might never even had before.

In the example, if you consider yourself to be an advanced user of Microsoft’s Office package, and you believe you know all about it, these books provide you the answers to questions you never knew you should even be asking. Everything was explained, plain and simple with illustrations, photographs, and every other kind of help a beginner or even an advanced user would need.

In this AWS Lambda Frequently Asked Questions article we’ll do our best to bring you closer and more familiar with AWS Lambda. Starting with what AWS Lambda is, how it works, and what perks can you expect from using AWS Lambda.

Introduction To AWS Lambda

To be able to understand AWS Lambda better, let’s make a brief introduction.

So, what is AWS Lambda? AWS Lambda or Amazon Web Services serverless deployment platform is a compute service that was launched back in 2014, and it allows you to run the code with no need for actually managing any servers. This means that AWS Lambda is actually a data processing service which will run the code only when events or some other triggers externally invoke the code. Simply put, it means that you can just upload your code to AWS and Amazon will set everything up for you so that the code can run.

AWS supports event-driven computing with numerous use-cases, and AWS Lambda will run the code only when it’s needed, while it will also scale it automatically. AWS Lambda can be used in the AWS cloud environment, and with no overhead whatsoever. This service is widely used between developers and cloud architects. The detailed explanation of AWS Lambda and all advantages/disadvantages you can find in one of our other blog posts.

By now, we concluded that the AWS Lambda is reasonably easy enough to use, and it gives you the opportunity to save quite the sum of money and resources, as well as the precious time. Considering the way of how they charge their users, which is on a pay-per-use basis, AWS Lambda wins yet another battle in simplicity. Coding tasks for websites, applications, and other services running on AWS will save you quite some time, which is a great virtue of this service.

How Does It All Work?

The simplicity of AWS Lambda is set on the sole purpose of doing what needs to be done while doing it fast, simple and easy. After you’ve uploaded your code to AWS, you need to set it up, so it’ll be invoked by other AWS services, mobile apps, or HTTP endpoints. AWS Lambda will then only use your code after it’s invoked, and by doing so, it’ll just use enough resources it needs for your code to run.

Another AWS Lambda FAQ is about how it all works out in practice? Well, the Serverless Team made a fantastic example by analyzing one app that was ready for production. This app had around 16000 requests per day at 200ms average response time. With this data, they’ve calculated how much exactly would it cost if hosting it with AWS Lambda compared to EC2.

The results they came by were magnificent. Lambda costs were 0.05$ per day, while two EC2 instances were 2.97$ per day. It was a breakthrough discovery, and all thanks go again to Amazon’s simplistic and sophisticated way of how AWS Lambda works. It is simple, thrilling, and engaging.

AWS Lambda Perks

Another benefit of AWS Lambda is that it supports different runtimes at the same time. Java, Python, and Node.js are all supported. It is a great advantage because it allows you to use different programming languages for developing different parts of your application. In case one of your teams uses JavaScript implementation for updating the user status, while another team prefers working in Node.js, it’s not a problem at all. AWS Lambda supports it all!

Another perk that AWS Lambda gives to its users is that you are able to build and accomplish a great variety of things with it like a real-time stream processing, filtering and sorting, 3rd party API requests, data validation, and data processing, and much more.

Summarizing Our Thoughts

All-in-all, AWS Lambda brings a whole new kind of future for developers, while companies as well will benefit from it being a cost-efficient service. All of this is just a mere beginning since we believe AWS Lambda will expand and bring more solutions to us. This will for sure bring a significant change in our everyday lives and work. Therefore, give us your opinions and thoughts about your views of AWS Lambda. If you need some more answers, or if you still have questions regarding AWS Lambda, let us answer them in the comment section below.

We aim to improve Dashbird every day and user feedback is extremely important for that, so please let us know if you have any feedback about these improvements and new features! We would really appreciate it!