AWS Lambda: How does it work?

If you are interested in growing your business, you may have heard the name AWS Lambda, one of the strongest options to stay competitive. But, you may not really know what it is or how this technology works. First of all, this is a computing service that allows you to run code without owning or managing servers, which has helped small and medium-sized organizations to be able to access more modern, powerful and complex infrastructure without a large investment of money. 

AWS Lambda from Amazon Web Services pioneered by being released in 2014 and since its inception it has set the standard. This is possible thanks to the fact that it is a serverless platform cloud computing with a highly available computing infrastructure that actively performs all necessary tasks to manage computing resources, including server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and autoscaling, as well as code monitoring and logging functions. 

AWS Lambda is a role-based cloud service that eliminates the provisioning and maintenance needs of complex physical infrastructure.. In addition, you provision and manage the infrastructure your Lambda functions run on, scale instances to circumvent excessive load times and have proper error handling.

The reduction offered by this service means faster development time for your app, increased agility as the team can get it done faster and more time spent on more important tasks like fixing bugs or new features. It even allows run multiple functions simultaneously; that is, we will not have to worry about stuck queues. We can provision and run multiple instances of the same Lambda function at the same time.

If you are interested in knowing more in detail how you can take advantage of these advantages, always remember to consult an expert team in the subject. Now, how does serverless technology work? Next, we explain it to you:

How does AWS Lambda and its serverless approach work?

Thanks to its serverless approach, you can create and run applications and services without having to worry about servers. Eliminate infrastructure management tasks such as server or cluster provisioning, patching, operating system maintenance, and capacity provisioning. You can create them for virtually any type of backend application or service. Plus, it manages everything you need to run and scale your application with high availability.

Thanks to this technology, your applications are event-driven and flexible in structure via APIs or messaging that react directly, such as a state change or endpoint request. Event-driven architectures decouple code from state. The integration between the loose fabric components is usually done asynchronously, by messaging.

aws lambda how it works
AWS Lambda applications run code on a highly available compute infrastructure and perform all compute resource management.

In turn, serverless architecture patterns use Lambda with other managed services that are also serverless. In addition to messaging and streaming services, serverless architectures use managed services such as Amazon API Gateway for API management, Amazon DynamoDB for data storage, and AWS Step Functions for orchestration.

Lambda runs code on a highly available compute infrastructure and performs all compute resource management. Among other things, it handles server and operating system maintenance, capacity provisioning and autoscaling, code and security patch deployment, and code monitoring and logging. All you have to do is provide the code. 

It's easy to get started with AWS Lambda. You must first create the function. To do this, upload the code (or create it directly in the Lambda console) and choose the memory capacity, timeout, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role. Next, specify the AWS resource to trigger the function. This can be a specific Amazon S3 bucket, an Amazon DynamoDB table, or an Amazon Kinesis stream. When the resource changes, Lambda will execute the function, launching and managing compute resources as needed to keep up with incoming requests.

What uses does it have?

One of the great advantages is that there is no need to learn new languages, tools or frameworks.. You can use any third party libraryeven the native ones. You can also package any code (frameworks, SDKs, libraries, etc.) as a Lambda layer, and easily manage and share it across multiple functions. Lambda natively supports Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python, and Ruby code, and provides a runtime API that allows you to use any additional programming language to create your functions.

You can use AWS Lambda to create new backend application services triggered on demand using the Lambda application programming interface (API) or custom API endpoints created using Amazon API Gateway. Lambda processes custom events rather than serving them on the client side, which helps you avoid client platform variations, reduce battery consumption, and enable easier updates.

Fully automated administration

With AWS Lambda, you never have to update the underlying operating system (OS) when a patch is released, or worry about resizing or adding new servers as usage increases. This technology seamlessly implements code, handles all tasks related to administration, maintenance, and security patches, and offers built-in monitoring and logging through Amazon CloudWatch.

Also invoke your code only when needed and scale automatically to support the rate of incoming requests without any manual configuration. There is no limit to the number of requests your code can handle. AWS Lambda typically starts executing code within a few milliseconds after an event.

Because AWS Lambda scales automatically, performance always stays high as the frequency of events increases. Since the code is stateless, Lambda can start as many instances as needed without lengthy deployments or configuration delays.

The software development kit (SDK) built into AWS Lambda integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to ensure secure code access to other AWS services. In this way, you run your code within the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) by default. If you want, you can configure access to the resources you use behind your own VPC to take advantage of custom security groups and network access control lists.

This provides secure Lambda function access to your resources within a VPC. It meets SOC, HIPAA, PCI, and ISO requirements. For the latest on Lambda compliance and certification readiness, see the list of all scope services.

how aws lambda works
AWS Lambda With AWS Lambda, you never have to update the underlying operating system (OS) when a patch is released, or worry about resizing or adding new servers as usage increases. This technology seamlessly deploys code, handles all tasks related to administration, maintenance, and security patches, and offers built-in monitoring and logging through Amazon CloudWatch.

Built-in fault tolerance

AWS Lambda maintains compute capacity across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) in each AWS Region to protect your code against the errors of individual machines or data center facilities. Both it and the functions that run on the service deliver predictable and reliable operational performance. It is designed to offer high availability for both the service itself and the functions it operates. There are no maintenance windows or scheduled downtime.

This technology also supports packaging and deployment capabilities as container images, making it easy for customers to build Lambda-based applications with familiar container image tools, workflows, and dependencies.

Customers also benefit from Lambda's operational simplicity, autoscaling with sub-second startup times, high availability, pay-as-you-go billing model, and native integrations with over 200 AWS services and applications. software as a service (SaaS). Enterprise customers can use a consistent set of tools with both their Lambda applications as with containers, thereby simplifying core governance requirements such as security scanning and image signing.

Connect to relational databases

Use Amazon RDS Proxy to take advantage of fully managed connection pools for relational databases. RDS Proxy efficiently manages thousands of concurrent connections to relational databases, making it easy to build highly scalable and secure Lambda-based serverless applications that interact with relational databases. RDS Proxy currently offers support for MySQL and Aurora. You can use RDS Proxy for your serverless applications through the Amazon RDS or Lambda console.

AWS Lambda Provisioned Concurrency gives you more control over the performance of your serverless application. When enabled, provisioned concurrency keeps functions activated and in the highest state of readiness to respond in double-digit milliseconds. In addition, it is ideal for any application that requires greater control over the start time of functions. Easily configure and adjust the concurrency your application needs. Scale up, scale out, or turn it off entirely based on demand. 

With Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) for AWS Lambda, you can read and write large volumes of data, in addition to preserving them, with a low latency level, at any scale. You don't need to write code and download data to temporary storage to process it. This saves time and simplifies your code, so you can focus on your business logic.

EFS for AWS Lambda is ideal for a number of use cases including processing or backing up large amounts of data, and loading large files or reference models. You can also share files between serverless instances or container-based applications, and even run machine learning (ML) inference using EFS.

aws lambda functions
AWS Lambda Provisioned Concurrency gives you more control over the performance of your serverless application.

Run Code in Response to Amazon CloudFront Requests

With Lambda@Edge, AWS Lambda can execute code across global AWS locations in response to Amazon CloudFront events, such as requests for content to or from readers or origin servers. This makes it easy to deliver richer, more personalized content with lower latency to end users. 

Create AWS Step Functions workflows to coordinate multiple AWS Lambda functions for complex or long-running tasks. Step Functions allows you to define workflows capable of triggering different Lambda functions by using sequential, parallel, forking, or error-handling steps. With Step Functions and Lambda, you can create rich, long-running processes for applications and backends.

Code signing for AWS Lambda allows you to verify that only unaltered code published by approved developers is deployed to your Lambda functions. Simply create digitally signed code artifacts and configure your Lambda functions to verify signatures on deployment. This increases the speed and agility of your application development, even within large teams, while enforcing high security standards.

If you are interested learn more about this, discover the solutions it offers and will offer Codster through Cloud Computing technology, as well as its correct Implementation. Surely we have the perfect solutions for your company such as AWS partners (Amazon Web Service).

Alejandra Correa

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