AWS For Admins For Dummies

Chapter 6

Responding to Events with Lambda

IN THIS CHAPTER

Defining the Lambda feature set

Working at the Lambda console

Managing basic Lambda applications

Administrators sometimes need to automate tasks, which can mean writing scripts (a kind of simple code) or providing specialized applications that someone else coded. This chapter isn’t about coding, nor is it about development, but it is about running code in a serverless environment called Lambda that’s tailor-made to administrator needs. You use Lambda to run the code, so what Lambda really provides is an execution environment. The Lambda environment can work with any application or back-end process, and Amazon automatically provides the scaling needed to ensure that the code you upload runs as expected (keeping in mind that the cloud environment can’t run code as quickly as a dedicated host server can). Using and configuring Lambda is free, but you do pay for the computing time and other resources that the code uses, so keep costs in mind when you use this service. Typically, you use Lambda in one of two ways (the first of which the chapter covers):

• As a response to an event triggered by a service or application
• As part ...