Amazon Web Services launches AWS Lambda

Amazon Web Services, Inc. has announced AWS Lambda, a compute service that runs developers’ code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources for them, making it easy to build and manage applications that respond quickly to new information. AWS Lambda starts running code within milliseconds of an event such as an image upload, in-app activity, website click, or output from a connected device. Developers can also use AWS Lambda to create new back-end services where compute resources are automatically triggered based on custom requests. Developers pay only for the requests served and compute time required to run their code. AWS Lambda charges for compute time in increments of 100 milliseconds, making it cost-effective and easy to scale apps to whatever number of requests are required.

Today, customers have many use cases where applications need compute cycles in order to take action on a change in the application’s data, such as a new image upload into Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), updated data in Amazon DynamoDB, or a real-time stream from Amazon Kinesis. Responding to these changes requires customers to manage significant compute fleets – usually across Availability Zones – and manage, configure, and scale these resources. AWS Lambda provides a high-performance computational platform which runs functions in code in response to changes in data, without the need to provision or manage a single virtual server. Customers write simple JavaScript code to take action on an event and upload it to AWS Lambda. Within milliseconds of a change in data, AWS Lambda responds by spinning up the appropriate compute resources to perform the action. It automatically scales to millions of requests, spreading across multiple Availability Zones if needed.

“AWS Lambda changes the way developers design and scale their dynamic applications in the cloud,” said Marco Argenti, Vice President, Mobile, Amazon Web Services. “With AWS Lambda, developers can quickly, easily, and cost-effectively write applications that respond to changes in data or the environment, creating new opportunities to deliver dynamic customer experiences.”

AWS Lambda works with any third-party library, including native ones, so developers don’t have to learn any new languages, tools, or frameworks. Developers can edit functions directly within AWS Lambda, which means they can instantly update an application without having to compile edits, build changes, and then redeploy the application. With AWS Lambda, developers can create their own backend that operates at AWS scale, performance, and security. AWS Lambda runs code within milliseconds of an event, and since each event is processed as an individual function, the performance remains consistently high as the frequency of events increases.

Netflix is the world's leading Internet television network with over 50 million members in nearly 50 countries enjoying more than one billion hours of TV shows and movies per month. “From years of managing a sophisticated and dynamic infrastructure, we’re excited by AWS Lambda and the prospect of an evolution in the way we build and manage our applications,” said Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer, Netflix. “From easier media transcoding and faster monitoring, from disaster recovery to improved security and compliance, AWS Lambda promises to help us develop dynamic event-driven computing patterns.”

SPS Commerce is the largest retail business network and a driving force in the omni-channel transformation of retailing. The SPS cloud services process more than $1 trillion in orders annually, while managing more than 35 million items, and sell through performance data at 300,000+ retail locations. “AWS Lambda promises to substantially transform how we do business as we use AWS to build the future of B2B exchanges,” said Jamie Thingelstad, CTO at SPS Commerce. “With this new AWS service, SPS Commerce’s system architecture can use AWS Lambda functions triggered off of Amazon S3 event notifications to perform multiple transformations when a new document is received from one of its 55,000 customers. With AWS Lambda as a component of its architecture, the SPS system can create smarter, dynamic workflows to shorten trading partner information processing across the SPS network and can scale to tens of millions of transactions per month automatically, without requiring any other infrastructure configurations.”

Earth Networks manages and operates a global sensor network that collects and processes real-time weather and lightning data delivered to customers such as the National Weather Service, U.S. Air Force, NASA, major utilities, and numerous state and local governments across the U.S. “We’ve been looking for an easy way to attach code to data, and AWS Lambda is an ideal solution,” said Eddie Dingels, Lead Architect, Earth Networks, the parent company of WeatherBug. “We already use Amazon DynamoDB for weather data aggregation and have built complex prediction and monitoring systems on top of this data. We have long-running background tasks for monitoring the incoming data, processing the changes, and triggering complex ETL processes. Now we can use the new Amazon DynamoDB Streams feature to easily detect new data and run our monitoring and prediction code on the incoming data in AWS Lambda, which reduces our compute costs and eliminates operational overhead. We are very excited to put AWS Lambda to work to deliver timely weather information to our customers.”