Programming AWS Lambda

Chapter 2. Getting Started with AWS Lambda

Chapter 1 provided you with the background for the rest of this book: the cloud, serverless, AWS, and an introduction to what Lambda is, how it works, and what it can be used for. But this is a practical book, for practical people, so in this chapter we’re going to roll up our sleeves and deploy some working functions to the cloud.

We’ll start by getting you a little more acclimated with the AWS Console, and then we’ll deploy and run our first Lambda function. After that we’ll get a local development environment ready, and finally we’ll build and deploy a locally developed function to Lambda.

Note

If you’re already experienced with AWS, please feel free to skip ahead to “Lambda Hello World (as Quickly as Possible)”.

Quick Guide to the AWS Console

The first two exercises in Chapter 1 involved acquiring AWS credentials and then logging into the AWS Web Console. If you haven’t done that already, you should do that now.

Slightly confusingly, there are three different types of credential that you may have used to log in:

• You may have used the account “root” user, using an email address and password. This is equivalent to using the root user in a Linux system.

• You may have used an “IAM user” and password. In this case you will have also needed to have provided the numeric AWS account ID (or an AWS account alias).

• Finally, you might have used a single sign-on method (e.g., via a Google Apps account).

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