What is AWS Lambda and how it works
Dashbird is a monitoring platform for monitoring modern cloud infrastructure by providing alerts, insights and data visualisation.
AWS Lambda is a Function-as-a-service (FaaS) computing platform provided by AWS. FaaS provides a computing platform to execute code in the cloud. As in any serverless system, it abstracts away the complexities of provisioning and managing a cloud infrastructure.
It is commonly used when building microservices applications, but also serves monolithic and other types of architectures as well. There are several use cases and multiple benefits from using AWS Lambda.
Lambda supports the following runtimes by default:
Developers can implement any other custom runtime of their choosing. The custom runtime will run in the Lambda execution environment. It can be a shell scrit or an executable binary3.
All Lambda functions consist of three key elements:
event
and context
objects (also takes an optional callback
object)Lambda functions are billed by the time it takes to execute your function, being rounded up to the nearest 100ms and the GB-seconds based on the memory consumption. It also comes with a free tier of 1 million requests and 400,00 GB-seconds of compute time each month.
After the free tier, it costs $0.20 per 1 million requests and $0.00001667 for every GB-seconds. The GB-seconds is based on the memory consumption of the Lambda function. For further details check out the Lambda Pricing Page or the Lambda Cost Calculator.
Footnotes
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