Our teams continue to enjoy using AWS Lambda and are beginning to use it to experiment with serverless architectures, combining Lambda with the API Gateway. We do recommend that Lambda functions contain only a moderate amount of code. Ensuring the quality of a solution based on a tangle of many large Lambda functions is difficult, and such a solution may not be cost-effective. For more complex needs, deployments based on containers or VMs are still preferable. In addition, we have run into significant problems using Java for Lambda functions, with erratic latencies up to several seconds as the Lambda container is started. Of course, you can sidestep this issue by using JavaScript or Python, and if Lambda functions do not contain a lot of code, the choice of programming language should not matter too much.
Our teams continue to enjoy using AWS Lambda and are beginning to use it to experiment with serverless architectures, combining Lambda with the API Gateway. We do recommend that Lambda functions contain only a moderate amount of code. Ensuring the quality of a solution based on a tangle of many large Lambda functions is difficult, and such a solution may not be cost-effective. For more complex needs, deployments based on containers or VMs are still preferable. In addition, we have run into significant problems using Java for Lambda functions, with erratic latencies up to several seconds as the Lambda container is started. Of course, you can sidestep this issue by using JavaScript or Python, and if Lambda functions do not contain a lot of code, the choice of programming language should not matter too much.
Our teams continue to enjoy using AWS Lambda and are beginning to use it to experiment with Serverless architectures, combining Lambda with the API Gateway to produce highly scalable systems with invisible infrastructure. We have run into significant problems using Java for Lambda functions, with erratic latencies up to several seconds as the Lambda container is started. We recommend sticking with JavaScript or Python for the time being.
AWS releases a huge number of new features on what seems like a monthly basis, so it can sometimes be hard for any new service offering to rise above the noise, but Lambda certainly manages to attract notice. Initially just supporting JavaScript, but now adding support for JVM-based applications (with more no doubt to follow), Lambda allows you to fire up very short-lived processes either in reaction to an event, or via a call from the related API Gateway. For stateless services, this means you don’t need to worry about running any long-lived machines, potentially reducing costs and improving security. Despite other forays into the PaaS space by AWS, Lambda looks the closest to getting this right.
