lambda.md

AWS Lambda

Why use AWS Lambda?

• Avoid limitations of EC2 Servers:
  • Virtual Servers in the Cloud
  • Limited by RAM and CPU
  • Continuously running
  • Scaling means intervention to add / remove servers
• Lambda provides:
  • Virtual functions
  • no servers to manage
  • Quick, short executions
  • Run on-demand
  • Scaling is fully automated

Benefits of AWS Lambda

• Easy Pricing:
• Pay per request and compute time
• Free tier of 1,000,000 AWS Lambda requests and 400,000 GBs of compute time
• Integrations with the entire AWS Stack
• Integrated with many programming languages
• Easy monitoring through AWS CloudWatch
• Easy to get more resources per functions (up to 3GB of RAM)
• Increasing RAM will also improve CPU and network

AWS Lambda language support:

• Node.js (JavaScript)
• Python
• Java (Java 8 compatible) • C# (.NET Core)
• Golang
• C# / Powershell

AWS Lambda pricing

• You can find overall pricing information here: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/
• Pay per calls:
• First 1,000,000 requests are free
• $0.20 per 1 million requests thereafter ($0.0000002 per request)
• Pay per duration: (in increment of 100ms)
• 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month if FREE
• == 400,000 seconds if function is 1GB RAM
• == 3,200,000 seconds if function is 128 MB RAM
• After that $1.00 for 600,000 GB-seconds
• It is usually very cheap to run AWS Lambda which makes it very popular

AWS Lambda configuration

• Timeout: default 3 seconds, max of 300s (Note: new limit 15 minutes) - Environment variables
• Allocated memory (128M to 3G)
• Ability to deploy within a VPC + assign security groups
• IAM execution role must be attached to the Lambda function