An Introduction To Serverless Computing Using Aws Lambda

Introduction

Serverless architecture has recently become a viable option for deploying applications, removing the need for server provisioning and management. Among the most used services for serverless functions is AWS Lambda. This article provides a quick introduction to AWS Lambda and demonstrates its usage through a simple application.

What is AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service provided by Amazon as part of Amazon Web Services. It is a computing service that runs code in response to events such as changes to data in an S3 Bucket, changes in a DynamoDB table, custom events from mobile applications, etc. The service manages all the computing resources automatically allowing you to focus on developing your applications.

A small introduction to writing AWS Lambda Function

For our first journey into the AWS Lambda realm, let's create a Lambda function to retrieve a list of EC2 instances. The function below is written in Python, using the boto3 library, AWS SDK for Python.

Before we proceed, ensure that boto3 is installed in your Python environment:

pip install boto3

Here's the function:

import boto3

def list_ec2_instances(event, context):
    ec2 = boto3.resource('ec2')

    instances = ec2.instances.filter(
        Filters=[{'Name': 'instance-state-name', 'Values': ['running']}])
    
    for instance in instances:
        print(instance.id, instance.instance_type)

In this code, we have created a function list_ec2_instances that gets a list of all running EC2 instances.

Conclusion

Serverless is becoming the future of application development due to its agility, scalability and cost-effectiveness. AWS Lambda is just one of the services that facilitate this. Getting started with AWS Lambda is not very difficult if you understand the core ideas as we have explored above.

This blog post just scratches the surface of what serverless computing can do. Delve deeper into AWS Lambda and serverless computing to unleash the full potential of this paradigm. Happy Coding!