Day Two Cloud 092: What AWS Lambda Is Good For

Today’s Day Two Cloud podcast is a thorough introduction to AWS Lambda, which is AWS’s serverless compute service. We discuss how Lamdba works, what it can do, use cases, and more. In general, serverless combines a managed service with event-driven compute to allow customers to avoid or minimize infrastructure management and reduce idle capacity. That is, the customer runs functions on demand rather than maintaining a persistent server instance. Our guide for today’s conversation is Julian Wood, Senior Developer Advocate for the Serverless Product Group at AWS. This is not a sponsored show. We discuss: * The differences between functions-as-a-service and serverless * A brief history of serverless at AWS * Core Lambda components * Common serverless use cases * Stitching functions together * How to package your code and supported languages * Addressing latency, state, and other issues * New features * More Sponsor: CBT Nuggets CBT Nuggets is IT training for IT professionals and anyone looking to build IT skills. If you want to make fully operational your networking, security, cloud, automation, or DevOps battle station visit cbtnuggets.com/cloud. Show Links: Serverlessland.com Blog – Amazon @julian_wood – Julian Wood on Twitter AWS Tech Talks – Serverless AWS Serverless Office Hours on Twitch AWS Serverless Workshops: Innovator Island & Wild Rydes WoodITWork – Julian’s blog Transcript: [00:00:00.990] – Ethan [AD] CBT Nuggets, is IT training for IT professionals and anyone looking to build IT skills, if you want to make fully operational your networking cloud security automation or DevOps Battle Station, visit CBT nuggets, dotcom slash cloud. That’s CBT nuggets. Dotcom slash cloud. [/AD] [00:00:24.720] Welcome to Day Two Cloud. Oh, boy, do we have a show for you today, we are going to go. I was going to say deep on AWS Ned, I don’t know how deep we actually get into AWS Lambda specifically, but we have developer advocate Julian Wood joining us. And we do get a pretty thorough introduction to Lambda what it can do, its use cases and so on. There was a lot here and Julian was very enthusiastic. [00:00:51.090] – Ned Yeah. So the thing that struck me is Julian and we talked for almost an hour, maybe a little bit more, and during that time I feel like we only scratched the surface. Like there is so much more to what you can do with Lambda the use cases, how it functions. We even get to talk about security and monitoring. So maybe that’s a whole other episode is very engaging and interesting conversation about Lambda and filled in some gaps for me that I didn’t even know I had. [00:01:18.540] – Ethan I felt the same way. It filled in gaps I didn’t know I had, because as we kept talking about what you could do with Lambda and the appropriate use cases that began to it made me rethink how I think about computing and how computing work gets done.