AWS Lambda was introduced last November and has already become popular with developers. It enables you to write code threads that run in response to specific event. One you create your Lambda function, it acts a bit like a spreadsheet function, running as soon as it is triggered. The function consists of your code along with associated configuration information, including the function name and resource requirements.

As explained on the AWS Lambda page:

"after you upload your code to AWS Lambda, you can associate your function with specific AWS resources (e.g. a particular Amazon S3 bucket, Amazon DynamoDB table, Amazon Kinesis stream, or Amazon SNS notification). Then, when the resource changes, Lambda will execute your function and manage the compute resources as needed in order to keep up with incoming requests.”

The Lambda service has already been enhanced with improvements including a synchronous invocation capability to make it better suited for developing the server-side code behind applications for the Web and Internet-of-Things (IoT).

You pay for Lambda according to the number of requests generated and the amount of code execution time. There’s a free tier that gives you 1 million monthly requests and 400,000 "GB-seconds" of monthly compute time.

According to Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, Java is the first in a series of additional language options that Amazon plans to make available to Lambda developers, and that you can begin writing your Lambda functions in Java immediately. He noted:

"To date, developers have written their Lambda functions in Node.js, a derivative of JavaScript designed specifically for use in server-side applications."

Now you can use the AWS ToolKit for Eclipse:

 

 

The addition means your Lambda code can make use of Java 8 features such as collections, and of Java libraries. You can also use the AWS SDK for Java to make calls to the AWS APIs. Support for Lambda Expressions was added in JDK 8, meaning you can treat functionality as a method argument, or code as data.

 

 

 

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AWS Lambda

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