Posts Tagged lambda

Since its introduction in 2014, AWS Lambda has rapidly expanded its capabilities from simple “functions in the cloud” at launch to a comprehensive serverless platform with support for containerized functions and public per-function URL endpoints.

As serverless applications have increased in sophistication, developers have used functions-as-a-service as a first-class tool in their microservices strategy. As organizations increasingly look to break up their monolithic applications into services, adoption of AWS Lambda has not been a viable option for applications that return payloads larger than the 6 MiB Lambda service limit. In addition to the payload response limit, AWS Lambda has been limited to returning the entire response once it has been fully buffered in memory within the Lambda service. This historical limitation meant that end users would not see any response until the entire response was available. Both of these limitations made Lambda difficult or impossible to use for data-intensive or latency-sensitive use cases.

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As AWS Lambda has matured as a serverless platform, there are two key ways the service has evolved:

1. New capabilities that extend the platform to support new use cases like Lambda Container support, Lambda URLs and attribute-based access control support.
2. Performance enhancements that enable Lambda functions to be more responsive and cost-effective such as Tiered compilation, and Graviton2 support are just a few examples of the investments AWS made in this space.

With each advancement, the reasons to deploy a full VM or cluster to support your application get fewer and the time to deliver value in the cloud gets shorter.

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Event-driven, serverless functions have become a defining feature of many modern cloud architectures. With recent capabilities such as AWS Lambda URLs and AWS Lambda Containers, AWS has made it clear that Lambda Functions are a platform that teams can use to deliver increasingly sophisticated services without worrying about managing underlying compute resources.

Today, AWS announced another advancement for their Lambda Functions platform: Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). At its core, ABAC support brings more granular permissions that are automatically applied based on IAM role tags, Lambda tags, or both. This update builds on well-established Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) principles while making it possible to implement granular controls without permissions updates for every new user and resource.

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When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, there was a phone number you could call to find out what time it was. It was a local number, 853-1212 (easy to remember as the arrangement of the numbers on the keypad made a capital T), and I used it all the time, to set my watch, adjust the alarm clock, fix the display on the VCR. I don’t recall the last time I used it, probably sometime in the mid ’90s, but I do remember clearly the sound of the voice at the other end of the line.

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If you’ve spent any time with Amazon API Gateway, you know it’s all about making it easier to manage a serverless REST API. But did you know you can do more with API Gateway than just invoke Lambdas? In this post, you’ll learn how to use Pulumi to connect API Gateway with EventBridge, Amazon’s serverless event bus, to build loosely coupled, scalable and maintainable apps and systems.

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In late 2018, AWS launched their first EC2 instances powered by ARM-based AWS Graviton Processors. These instances had been optimized for performance and cost. Since that initial launch, Amazon has continued to innovate in the Graviton space. In June 2021, they launched the Graviton Challenge for users to move their applications to AWS Graviton2. AWS Graviton2 processor instance types are up to 20% lower cost than x86 based instance types and see up to 40% better price performance.

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Ever since AWS Lambda was released in 2015, users have wanted persistent file storage beyond the small 512MB /tmp disk allocated to each Lambda function. The following year, Amazon launched EFS, offering a simple managed file system service for AWS, but initially only available to mount onto Amazon EC2 instances. Over the last few months, AWS has been extending access to EFS to all of the modern compute offerings. First EKS for Kubernetes, then ECS and Fargate for containers. Today, AWS announced that EFS is now also supported in Lambda, providing easy access to network file systems from your serverless functions.

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Due to the nature of the product we build, the Pulumi team needs to have access to several cloud providers to develop and test the product. An increasing number of cloud providers comes with an associated ever-increasing cost.

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Scheduling events has long been an essential part of automation; many tasks need to run at specific times or intervals. You could be checking StackOverflow for new questions every 20 minutes or compiling a report that is emailed every other Friday at 4:00 pm. Today, many of these tasks can be efficiently accomplished in the cloud. While each cloud has its flavor of scheduled functions, this post steps you through an example using AWS CloudWatch with the help of Pulumi.

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The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud ecosystem is large and vibrant, so vast and vibrant that at times, it can be challenging to know where best to start! In the case of containers, Abby Fuller tweeted a descriptive summary about using AWS container services.

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