AWS Lambda is Amazon’s event-driven, serverless computing platform, which is part of Amazon Web Services. As a result, you won’t be worried about deciding which AWS tools to launch or how to handle them. Instead, you can upload the code to Lambda, where it will execute.

AWS Lambda for your Business

1.     File processing

Let’s say you have a photo-sharing app. People upload images to your app, and the app stores these photos in an Amazon S3 bucket. The application then creates a thumbnail version of each user’s images and displays them on the user’s profile page. In this case, you might write a Lambda function that generates a thumbnail for you automatically.

2.     Data and analytics

Assume you’re developing an analytics app and need to store raw data in a DynamoDB table.  When you make any changes to the items in a table, DynamoDB streams will publish item update events to the streams associated with the table. The item key, event name, and other relevant information are all provided by the event data in this case.

3.     Websites

Assume you’re building a website and want to use Lambda to host the backend logic. You can use Amazon API Gateway as the HTTP endpoint to invoke your Lambda function. Your web client can now call the API, and API Gateway will then route to Lambda.

4.     Mobile applications

Say you have a custom mobile app that generates events. To process events published by your custom application, you can define a Lambda function. For example, to handle the clicks inside your custom mobile app.

Benefits

1)     No servers to manage

Lambda runs the code on highly accessible, fault-tolerant infrastructure that spans multiple Availability Zones (AZs) in a single Region, seamlessly deploying code and taking care of infrastructure administration, maintenance, and patches.

2)     Continuous scaling

Lambda scales the functions (or application) precisely by running event-triggered code in parallel and processing each event individually.

3)     Millisecond metering

You’ll be paid for every 1 millisecond (ms) your code runs, as well as the number of times your code is activated, with AWS Lambda. Instead of paying per server unit, you pay for reliable throughput or execution time.

4)     Modernize your application

Lambda allows you to quickly inject artificial intelligence into your applications by using functions with pre-trained machine learning models. A single API request can identify images, analyze videos, convert speech to text, etc.

Why AWS Lambda for serverless security?

Security should always be the top priority when designing and developing applications, and this does not change with a serverless architecture. Rather than enforcing application security by things like antivirus/malware applications, file integrity monitoring, intrusion detection/prevention systems, firewalls, and so on, you maintain security best practices by writing stable application code, strong access control over source code changes, and so on.

Serverless Security Strategies

A.     One IAM Role per Function

Within your AWS account, each Lambda function should have a 1:1 relationship with an IAM role. Always decouple your IAM roles so that you can ensure the least privileged policies for the future of your position, even if several functions start with the same policy.

B.     Temporary AWS Credentials

Your Lambda function should not contain any long-lived AWS credentials. To integrate with other AWS services, the IAM execution role is usually all that is needed. Using the AWS SDK, you can build AWS service clients without providing any credentials directly from your code.

C.     Using Secrets

Secrets should never be logged or written to disk and should only remain in memory. In the case that a secret has to be revoked when your application is still running, write code to handle the rotation of secrets.

D.     API Authorizationn

You have control of authentication and authorization of your API clients when you use API Gateway as the event source for your Lambda feature, unlike the other AWS service event source choices.

E.     VPC Security

If your Lambda function needs access to resources in a VPC, you can use network security best practices like least privilege security classes, Lambda function-specific subnets, network ACLs, and route tables to ensure that only traffic from your Lambda functions gets to the right places.

Conclusion

AWS Lambda provides a comprehensive set of tools for developing stable and scalable applications. Using AWS to create serverless applications frees you from the restrictions and limitations that servers impose and ffocus your development efforts on what makes your app unique.

 

FAQs