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In 2023, advancements in cloud technology are disrupting the traditional ways in which businesses operated before. Each industry, from fintech and eCommerce to healthcare and manufacturing, can gain strong advantages from leveraging the latest tech solutions.
Proper implementation of modern technology can transform your business and increase your revenue dramatically. How can serverless architecture do just that? What is an AWS Lambda function, and what are practical examples of it changing the ways businesses operate? Take a few minutes to find out the answers in this article!
For many organizations, IT system integration services became some of the most effective approaches to saving costs and optimizing operations. It became possible due to the dramatic rise and astonishing evolution of the technology called serverless architecture, also known as serverless computing.
Serverless architecture is a cloud computing model that allows developers to build and run software applications without the need of having and managing actual in-house physical servers, computers, and data storage. In this case, the cloud provider takes care of all server management hassles, scaling issues, technical aspects, and overall availability of servers.
From a technical standpoint, applications in serverless architecture are broken down into smaller components, also known as functions. These functions are designed to be stateless and independent, responding to a certain event or trigger.
It’s no wonder so many businesses choose this solution, as it offers a number of significant advantages over having their own physical infrastructure:
According to research from Global Market Insights, the size of the serverless architecture market exceeded USD 9 billion in 2022 and is projected to expand at over 25% CAGR from 2023 to 2032. So, you should expect even wider adoption of this technology among your competitors.
In this article, we’ll focus on one of those functions in greater detail. If you want to learn more about serverless architecture and exactly how your business can benefit from it, read our guide Serverless Architecture 101 to get all the answers!
AWS Lambda is an event-driven serverless computing service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the leaders in the market. AWS Lambda functions allow software developers to create functions on a pay-per-use basis without a need to have data storage or computing resources. This service, in some cases, is called Function as a Service (FaaS).
From a technical perspective, an AWS Lambda function is basically a piece of code written in one of the supported programming languages (including Python, Node.js, Java, and C#) that performs a specific task or function. After the triggering of the function, AWS Lambda automatically dedicates the necessary computing resources to run this function and executes the code. AWS Lambda manages the scaling and availability execution based on the incoming events automatically.
Ultimately, the AWS Lambda function is developed to help an organization to focus on business logic, instead of managing the operating system’s access control, patching, scaling, right-sizing provisioning, etc. One of the main business benefits of this service is the fact that it can trigger over 200 AWS services, meaning that there is an incredible number of possible natural integrations and also possibilities to integrate Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Amazon Lambda functions can perform any computing task required, from serving web pages and processing large amounts of data to calling APIs and integrating with other AWS services. We’ll discuss the most popular use cases in the sections below, so you could decide if it’s the right fit for the challenges you have.
Let’s make a quick review of the most common use cases that could be beneficial to your organization.
You can leverage the possibility to host static serverless websites. You will have only fixed costs for running the database service and will pay for the usage of the website when the actual traffic comes.
Just like with serverless architecture, running serverless websites can result in massive cost savings for organizations, since they only need to pay only for function execution time and number of API requests. Additionally, serverless websites are easier to develop due to the access to multiple in-built tools and frameworks, which makes development efforts more productive.
From a marketing perspective, convenience for the development team converts into the speed of making and applying content changes, which allows for responding to market changes faster and staying ahead of competitors.
You may have a need for user documents and files that are not always in one of the most common formats like HTML or PDF, so you need the freedom to operate with specialized formats.
There is an option to store each particular document in a format that is likely to be requested, however, it will take up storage space and is not practical in such cases as when the content of those documents changes often. AWS Lambda helps to solve this issue, as there is functionality to retrieve documents, format and convert them, display them on a webpage, and make documents available for download.
With AWS Lambda, you can do much more than just clean the cache. There is a possibility to use predictive page rendering functionality, which is aimed to prepare pages that the users will visit more likely. This AWS Lambda function example includes retrieving documents and multimedia files which may be needed while predicting which web page will be visited next web page.
Among other AWS lambda function examples is the ability to wait for a response from an external source, while the main program is continuing with other elements of the process. This helps to eliminate one of the main reasons for slowdowns in web-based services.
Log analysis is important for identifying areas where over-utilization of resources occurs, as well as detecting possible security flaws. Effective and timely log analysis can leverage additional cost savings for the organization.
There is a possibility to easily launch a Lambda function that will help to check log files from Cloudwatch or Cloudtrail. This check includes Lambda looking for specific events or particular log entries and alerting you when the event of interest happens via Amazon Simple Notification Service, a low-cost infrastructure for the mass delivery of messages on Amazon AWS. Sending notifications to other platforms is also available, for example Zendesk and Slack.
This functionality can be easily accessed in the AWS Lambda function to its fullest capacity. Additionally, you can generate automated reports and notifications on those backups as well.
Having automated backups will give you peace of mind and confidence that your critical digital assets will be protected. For your developers, automated backups offer such benefits as faster disaster recovery, version control, and additional flexibility in testing and development. Ultimately, all of those benefits result in higher resilience, reliability, and operational efficiency of your business.
Response time is one of the most important factors in the convenience of any kind of website, as even the slightest response delay can be a major factor in the loss of traffic. There are factors you can’t control, like the speed or the availability of a user’s internet connection—however, there are some aspects that Lambda can help with. For example, backend tasks responding to frontend requests for your website can be sped up and optimized for better performance.
There are instances when your app may need to process large volumes of streaming input data on the spot, and moving it to temporary storage for later processing may not be a suitable option. There is a solution for this challenge, as you can send the data stream to a specifically designed AWS Lambda application that will pull and process the necessary information. This way, all real-time tasks will be handled without slowing the performance of your main application. Possible examples of data sources include website clickstream, payment transactions, social media timelines, IT logs, and location-based tracking.
Before making any business decision on using this technology in your organization, it would be a smart move to evaluate possible advantages and limitations. Here are the most important things you should be aware of.
The usage of AWS Lambda unlocks all the business benefits that the concept of serverless architecture has. Ultimately, your team will be able to focus on building software and forget about managing hardware.
As mentioned before, AWS Lambda functions scale up and down automatically to deal with incoming requests. For your business, this means that you’ll get resources with high availability, having as much computing power as needed for current tasks, and when you don’t need computing power, you won’t pay for it.
You will be charged only for the actual computing time consumed by your functions. You will not pay for the time when your apps are doing nothing. This pay-per-use concept offers significant financial advantages over traditional server-based architectures.
Thanks to integrated AWS services in Lambda, businesses can benefit from the capabilities of a multitude of AWS offerings, which can potentially streamline development processes, improve scalability and performance, optimize costs, improve security and compliance, and offer valuable insights. There is an extensive AWS ecosystem with community support. The integration with AWS services allows businesses to build robust, scalable, and feature-rich applications, tailor-made for their specific requirements.
The event-driven design of this technology allows the building of reactive and scalable applications, with functions triggered by the events from sources you need. For businesses, this means better agility, scalability, and faster responsiveness.
The absence of infrastructure that the user needs to maintain and a set of tools for deployment, monitoring, and troubleshooting makes the development process with AWS Lambda functions faster and more efficient.
Compared to classical monolith or even microservice approaches, with AWS Lambda it’s much harder to reuse code across the functions.
Depending on the region and selected runtime, execution time limits may vary. The default maximum execution time is up to 15 minutes, so long-running tasks may require alternative solutions.
There are other technical aspects you should be also aware of:
As a result of a stateless design of AWS Lambda functions, they don’t maintain information or state between invocations. That means you need to have an external database or a file storage service in order to store persistent data.
When a certain Lambda function is not invoked frequently enough, it may experience a cold start latency, meaning that the time to complete the execution of the function will increase. To dive into specifics, If the function hasn’t been used for the last 15 minutes, the latency will increase to up to 10 seconds, which is critical for certain applications. However, this is not a big issue, since frequent invocations can solve this.
You should be aware that your application will be tied to the AWS ecosystem. Yes, there are portability options and interoperability support, but it’s important to consider potential vendor lock-in limitations before developing the product.
Compared to traditional architectures, it can be more challenging to debug Lambda functions and perform activities like logging, monitoring, and distributed tracing.
You need to be aware of the load for your applications because, with them, AWS Lambda costs will increase accordingly. The resulting costs may end up higher, compared to other possible cloud solutions. So, without proper calculations on your side, it may not be as cost-effective as it may seem at first glance.
It’s possible to add custom runtimes to AWS Lambda, but building them may require a lot of custom coding. If the version of the programming language you plan to use is not supported in Lambda, it would be a good idea to choose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or other cloud providers. AWS EC2 is a common alternative to AWS Lambda, and we’ll compare the two in the next section.
The most common alternative to Lambda is another product by Amazon called Amazon EC2. Let’s compare the two and find out how they differ.
As we mentioned before, Lambda is a completely serverless computing service that only requires uploading and running your code to start. EC2, on the other hand, has cloud-based virtual machines (VMs) architecture, which allows businesses to create and manage virtual machines (basically, virtual versions of the computers) in a flexible, scalable, and secure manner in the AWS cloud. This opens up an entirely new world of possibilities for customization, including tweaking provision capacity, setting the operating system you need, migrating an existing application to the cloud faster, picking necessary network tools, etc. However, you need to have experience and expertise to fully benefit from those options and know how to make the best of them.
If you don’t have the desire or time to dive deep into technical aspects, Lambda offers a readily available, easily managed and scalable, and highly secured computing platform out-of-the-box.
There are two main pricing models for the service—let’s break down each one.
This pricing model is a good fit if you have workloads with variable traffic patterns and sporadic usage of applications and/or when latency is not critical.
This pricing model is a good option when you have workloads with steady or predictable traffic patterns and real-time applications and scenarios in which low latency and responsiveness are critical.
The choice of a proper pricing model, as well as calculating your costs properly, will allow you to manage your spending, optimize resource usage, make data-driven decisions, and ultimately use AWS Lambda to its fullest potential.
The first thing you should do is learn about pricing on the official page. There you can find a cost calculator that will allow you to estimate the costs based on your expected usage patterns and requirements for your specific use cases. It is a good idea to consult tech experts for this matter. We at NIX can consult you on all the aspects of AWS Lambda functions and provide you with detailed feedback both on the technical and business sides of this service, helping you get as much business value and cost-efficiency as possible.
There are multiple tools and techniques for monitoring, measuring, and cost optimization. Let’s briefly discuss the most common ways to monitor AWS Lambda function costs below.
This is a graphical interface that allows you to analyze AWS costs. Among its features are visualizations and preconfigured reports that allow tracking spending over certain periods of time. You can view your spending categorized by region, service, or particular Lambda functions. It’s also possible to set allocation tags for Lambda functions that will allow gaining deeper insights into your spending.
This tool will provide you with a complete overview of cost trends, usage metrics, and cost breakdowns for all AWS services, including Lambda. You can set billing alerts to receive notifications when costs exceed predefined thresholds.
Amazon CloudWatch Logs is a service that enables users to collect, monitor, store, and analyze log files from various AWS resources and custom applications. While performing tasks, AWS Lambda streams logs to Amazon CloudWatch. After analyzing those logs, you’ll gain insights into the duration and execution times of your functions. Based on this information, it’s possible to create your own custom metrics for log data in order to monitor spending and track the anomalies.
Lambda also automatically sends multiple metrics to AWS CloudWatch, including invocation counts, durations, and errors. Just like with logs, you can use them to track costs and set alarms for each specific metric.
Additionally, there are detailed reports on Lambda usage and costs which are available in CSV format and can be accessed through AWS Management Console. These reports can be used for even deeper analysis and cost management.
Finally, there are various third-party cost optimization tools for AWS Lambda. Tools like CloudHealth, CloudCheckr, and Lumigo offer advanced analytics functionality, cost forecasting, and personalized recommendations to optimize spending.
This was one of the first well-known use cases of Lambda. The company needs to take care of petabytes of various types of data for its 230+ million subscriber base. Netflix leverages Lambda by using declarative rule-based triggers to make their infrastructure adapt automatically to changes in the application layer. In addition to managing infrastructure operations, Lambda also helps Netflix with security, log processing, and video transcoding.
The online marketplace leader for lodging and vacation rentals improves its operation efficiencies by covering such tasks as image processing, data analytics, and event-driven workflows.
The worldwide beverage giant uses Lambda to take care of its mobile app infrastructure, particularly, for data processing and delivering personalized experiences.
Summing up, if you’re ready to benefit from a serverless architecture and transform your organization to modern standards, AWS Lambda is a great technology choice. Despite its limitations, it can bring massive cost savings and performance improvements if used right. The crucial thing here is a proper calculation of Lambda spending and making sure that your apps or websites are using only necessary resources. If you need any technological advice or help with AWS Lambda, feel free to contact NIX for a consultation!
Artur is passionate about shaping the future of cloud architecture and driving innovation in enterprise solutions. He adeptly empowers businesses to thrive in fast-paced environments, skillfully leveraging the power of serverless technologies to optimize cloud economics.
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