AWS Lambda Lab

AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources for you, making it easy to build applications that respond quickly to new information. Lambda opens up all kinds of new possibilities and can lower your costs at the same time. When running a job-processing server in EC2, you are charged for compute time as long as your instance is still running. Contrast that with Lambda where you are only charged while actually processing a job. This makes Lambda a great fit for spiky or infrequent workloads because it scales automatically and minimizes costs during slow periods. The event-based model Lambda provides makes it perfect for providing a backend for mobile clients, other smart devices, or adding no-stress asynchronous processing to an existing application.

In this introductory Lab, you will learn how to use AWS Lambda to easily run code to react to events. Events can come from DynamoDB changes, SNS messages, S3 objects, Kinesis streams, or a variety of other sources. Owing to its versatility, Lambda has found use in a wide variety of applications including mobile apps, Internet of Things backends, and big data systems.

Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this Lab, you will be able to:

Understand what Lambda functions are and what makes them unique
Create Lambda functions using the AWS Console
Test Lambda functions