Is AWS Lambda actually useful?

If you’re in developing business, you’ve probably heard about AWS Lambda by now. In case you haven’t, AWS Lambda has been among us for years, and it certainly brought a whole new level for running a code. The benefits of using AWS Lambda are vast, and many developers already use AWS Lambda daily. If you’re not among them, read through this article to learn more about what AWS Lambda can do for you and your code.

On the other hand, if you believe you don’t need AWS Lambda, you should give it a try anyway, and it just might surprise you. Once you realize how it works, and how your business can benefit from it, you’ll change your mind. In this article, we’ll talk about AWS Lambda in general, and we’ll mention just some of the many benefits it brings.

AWS Lambda Explained

AWS Lambda is a computing service which allows you to run your code with no need for server management. AWS Lambda will automatically scale and execute your code, from several requests per day, up to thousands per one second. The best thing of all is that you’ll be charged only with the compute time that you’ve used, meaning that you won’t be charged if your code is not running.

AWS Lambda allows you to run your code for any back-end service or application with no administration included whatsoever. All you need to do is to supply your code in one of the languages that AWS Lambda supports, and it’ll do everything for you. It will run your code in high-availability computing infrastructure while it’ll also perform an entire administrating process of computing resources. That includes automatic scaling and provision of capacity, maintaining the server and operating system, as well as logging and code monitoring.

AWS Lambda is a fantastic service that offers many other services to its users. You’ll be glad you chose to use AWS Lambda after you realize how useful it can be.

Using AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a perfect computing platform for various application scenarios only if you can write your code in the AWS supported languages. Furthermore, you must run your code inside the AWS Lambda standard runtime environment using the resources provided by AWS Lambda. When using AWS Lambda, you should know that you are solely responsible for your code. AWS Lambda can compute a system that will keep the network, CPU, memory, and other resources in balance. This means that, for flexibility purposes, you’re not able to log in and compute instances, neither can you optimize language runtime or the operating system. Because of this, AWS Lambda can perform administrative and operational activities for you. These activities include applying security patches, deployment of your code, logging and monitoring your Lambda functions, control over provisioning capacities, etc.

AWS Lambda gives the possibility to run your code in response to events like if some data has changed in Amazon DynamoDB table or an Amazon S3 bucket. It also allows you to run your code as a response to HTTP requests via Amazon API Gateway.

Have you ever considered to invoke your code via API calls that were made using AWS SDKs?

That’s possible as well.

Using your AWS Lambda for building data processing triggers, as well as to stream processed data that’s stored inside Kinesis allows you to manipulate your needs quickly. We should mention that you can also create a back-end able to operate at AWS scale, security, and performance.

With Amazon Web Services by your side, there’s no need to worry about anything, and you don’t need to understand the entire complex infrastructure. AWS offers a “sample code,” which can be used for file and stream processing in real-time. This sample code can also be used for file extraction or transformation, for serverless back-ends, etc. IoT Sensors will detect and then redirect the information, while mobile back-ends are used for social media applications as well as for web applications.

AWS Lambda Use Cases

There are multiple other AWS use cases, and we’ll mention some like creating a serverless chatbot which is quite popular these days. Considering how time-consuming and hard it is to build a chatbot (not to mention the cost), developers are tasked with provisioning, scaling, and running all the infrastructural resources that are used for running a chatbot.

On the other hand, AWS Lambda allows you to run a chatbot architecture that is scalable in just a few simple steps. The first step is entering your code logic into your Lambda function. From there, you must set up your code to trigger when any of those commands are sent to the chatbot. These commands are requested via API (Messenger, Slack, etc.) and further routed from API Gateway to Lambda function.

You should consider the fact that Lambda only runs when you give a command. Therefore, it uses the resources only when needed, which further means that you’ll be billed only for the time your code was running.

AWS Lambda also allows you to use “mass mailing” with some additional service like SES (Simple Email Service). Combining the two services, you’ll get a cost-effective and in-house serverless emailing platform. Many companies are in dire need of these services, which is yet another benefit AWS Lambda brings.

Our Thoughts

If you’re searching for the perfect business solution, and if you are considering moving to a computing service model that is utility-based, search no further. AWS Lambda is here to stay, and considering how fast it’s growing, we’ll see more of its services in days to come. Moreover, we can expect it to become even more exciting and useful! AWS Lambda might seem complicated for newcomers, but in its essence, it’s an excellent working service that constantly keeps improving. Find more new articles about AWS Lambda on our Dashbird Blog page, and feel free to share your ideas and thoughts about this topic in the comment box below.

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Dashbird was born out of our own need for an enhanced serverless debugging and monitoring tool, and we take pride in being developers.

What our customers say

Dashbird gives us a simple and easy to use tool to have peace of mind and know that all of our Serverless functions are running correctly. We are instantly aware now if there’s a problem. We love the fact that we have enough information in the Slack notification itself to take appropriate action immediately and know exactly where the issue occurred.

Thanks to Dashbird the time to discover the occurrence of an issue reduced from 2-4 hours to a matter of seconds or minutes. It also means that hundreds of dollars are saved every month.

Great onboarding: it takes just a couple of minutes to connect an AWS account to an organization in Dashbird. The UI is clean and gives a good overview of what is happening with the Lambdas and API Gateways in the account.

I mean, it is just extremely time-saving. It’s so efficient! I don’t think it’s an exaggeration or dramatic to say that Dashbird has been a lifesaver for us.

Dashbird provides an easier interface to monitor and debug problems with our Lambdas. Relevant logs are simple to find and view. Dashbird’s support has been good, and they take product suggestions with grace.

Great UI. Easy to navigate through CloudWatch logs. Simple setup.

Dashbird helped us refine the size of our Lambdas, resulting in significantly reduced costs. We have Dashbird alert us in seconds via email when any of our functions behaves abnormally. Their app immediately makes the cause and severity of errors obvious.