Lambda is an on-demand serverless computing service that enables developers to create applications that scale as needed for increasing or variable workloads. This ebook looks at how Lambda complements other AWS services and how your business might benefit from it.

NOTE: This PDF is an excerpt from Serverless computing: A guide for IT leaders, published on TechRepublic Premium, our premium sister site. TechRepublic Premium offers IT policy templates, original research, and comprehensive guides on technology and business leadership issues. You can download the full ebook by signing up for a free trial.

From the ebook:

The original pitch for cloud computing was the ability to scale computing power to the needs and growth of your organization—without provisioning the physical hardware in advance or dealing with the corresponding lifecycle tasks of installation, hardware maintenance, and eventual decommissioning. “Serverless” computing services, foremost among which is AWS Lambda, are the logical next step in the “as-a-service” model of delivering computing resources.

What is AWS Lambda?
AWS Lambda is the serverless computing component of the AWS catalog, enabling developers to execute arbitrary code on demand, without the need to provision or manage a “full” server or a computing instance like Amazon EC2. After being triggered, AWS Lambda tasks are typically executed within milliseconds. In an AWS Lambda operation, the processing time is limited to 300 seconds, with usage billing metered in units of 100ms.

As with any other cloud computing service, billing reflects the amount of computing resources actually used. If no task is being executed, there is no charge.

What are the benefits of using AWS Lambda?
Smart deployment of AWS Lambda for your application workflows can increase the performance of existing infrastructure in your organization as tasks are offloaded onto Lambda functions. AWS Lambda functions execute on-demand when invoked by an application, allowing for highly variable self-managing workloads beyond what cloud-hosted virtual machine (VM) lifecycle management rules can achieve in terms of performance. By engineering applications to rely on serverless functions, developers can decrease the cost of cloud deployments in use cases where variable workloads in EC2 can be offloaded to Lambda, decreasing underutilized high-capacity instances.