One of the hot topics in software development these days is serverless applications. As with so many other areas, Amazon has a service for that. The Lambda offering is a full-featured way to get started with serverless. Better yet, they include a large number of tutorials and a repository of serverless apps to help you move from zero to guru in no time.
Free Tier Eligible
The lambda service includes 1,000,000 free requests per month. Even better, this does not expire after twelve months. All AWS subscribers get this free offering. The pricing for Lambda does include some other details so check out this page for the latest details. There are also pricing alert options for lambda that you might want to utilize to keep from surprise bills.
Execute your code without any other concerns
The Lambda service supports Java, Python, C#, and node.js currently. There is only a little bit to learn to build your functions in these languages, and it is easy to adapt. They have a number of tutorials that being with a getting started page. An experienced developer can be cranking out lambda functions in under an hour.
As an example, here is the Java hello world code they provide:
package example; import com.amazonaws.services.lambda.runtime.Context;
import com.amazonaws.services.lambda.runtime.LambdaLogger;
public class Hello {
public String myHandler(int myCount, Context context)
{
LambdaLogger logger = context.getLogger();
logger.log("received : " + myCount); return String.valueOf(myCount);
} }
The challenge with this service is not using it as much as it is thinking of the applications.
Food For Thought – The Repository
If you have any trouble finding a use for serverless applications, there is a repository full of them. The tutorials can get you started with a few ideas. However, the Serverless Application Repository provides numerous examples to get your wheels turning. These examples will also help you understand the back-end resources available as well as the sort of requirements these functions have. If security is a concern, the samples can provide best practices for how to secure your code and limit access.
AWS Lambda is a rabbit hole of technology, tutorials, examples, and possibilities. Thus, we will be back to visit this service in future posts as we provide our examples and lessons learned.
