AWS Lambda

The first service we are going to look at is AWS Lambda by AWS. The tagline for the service is quite a simple one:

"Run code without thinking about servers."

Now those of you who have used AWS before might be thinking the tagline makes it sound a lot like the AWS Elastic Beanstalk service. This service inspects your code base and then deploys it in a highly scalable and redundant configuration. Typically, this is the first step for most people in moving from pets to cattle as it abstracts away the configuration of the AWS services which provide the scalability and high availability.

Before we work through launching a hello world example, which we will be doing for all of the services, we will need an AWS account and its command-line tools installed.