Amazon has announced AWS Lambda, a compute service that runs your code in response to events so you can create apps that respond quickly to new information.

AWS Lambda starts running code within milliseconds of an event such as an image upload, in-app activity, website click, or output from a connected device.

You can also use it to create back-end services where resources such as an Amazon S3 bucket, DynamoDB table, or Kinesis stream are triggered based on custom requests to manage changes in application data. For instance, your code can watch for a pattern, such as an address, and trigger an alert.

As Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO put in his announcement of AWS Lambda during the Day 2 Keynote at AWS re:Invent

This will run for you automatically, without any computing infrastructure that you have to provision for it. This is easy to use, low maintenance. You can run code without managing infrastructure. Let me repeat that: you can write code without having to manage any infrastructure … Lambda will take care of managing, scaling and logging for you. 

The way Lambda works is that you create a Lambda function consisting of JavaScript code that you want to run on AWS. Once uploaded, the code will be always ready to run as soon as it is triggered, similar to a formula in a spreadsheet. The function consists of your code and configuration information giving the function name and resource requirements. Lambda functions are stateless, and Lambda can launch as many copies of the function as needed to scale to the rate of incoming events.

The idea is that you use Lambda functions alongside your application code, so when that code causes a change in the application’s data, such as a new image upload into Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), updated data in Amazon DynamoDB, or a real-time stream from Amazon Kinesis,

Lambda handles the data, without the need to provision or manage a single virtual server. Lambda will automatically scale to millions of requests, spreading across multiple Availability Zones if needed. In addition to being triggered by data changes, you can trigger Lambda functions by external event timers, so functions can be run during regularly scheduled maintenance times or non-peak hours. Events from connected devices such as weather sensors or house alarms can also trigger Lambda functions, so you could send a customized Amazon SNS notification when a smart thermostat indicates that the temperature is outside a defined limit.

Lambda is charged according to the requests served and compute time required to run your code, with compute time charged in increments of 100 milliseconds.  

AWS Lambda is currently in Preview. Developers who want to use it are invited to sign up to be added to its waiting list.

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