Gone are the days when you had to provision and maintain servers full time and pay huge costs for it (even though it is idle 99% of the time). The world is going serverless where someone else takes care of running your code automatically whenever you want.
AWS Lambda is one such service which runs your piece of code when an event occurs – could be an HTTP API call, a message put in a queue or a file put in an S3 bucket.
And NO! This isn’t the usual cloud servers where you pay for the full hour. You pay in multiples of 100ms intervals of when your code executes and don’t even have to pay a dime if no execution occurs.
I presented real world code with a hands-on demo of how you can easily deploy your python code – be it a simple script to process your log files or handle HTTP API requests to return JSON responses. I also talked about where you can’t use lambdas and also workarounds for those use cases.
Going serverless for most of your backend processes will save you lot of money, which is a real differentiator when it comes to pricing your products competitively.
Some of the places where people use AWS Lambdas are:
- replace most parts of the data pipeline for data munging and pre-processing
- do basic image manipulation of user uploaded images
- user activity tracking, metrics generation, log file processing, etc.
- build backends for IOT devices with data from sensors
- and even obscure use cases like having your own free commenting system for a static blog.