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0 pointsminimaul3y ago0 comments

We use Lambda to handle lots of scale-out tasks & extensions to AWS services too - it works really well for this.

For example:

- resizing images - we can do a size per lambda all in parallel. This means we can process images quickly (with minimal latency) without having to have loads of slack memory & CPU on our backends

- queue processing - we have an app that needs to copy files from user provided URLs to S3. We do this by dumping them in a SQS queue and having a lambda fire for each queue item. Means we can do lots in parallel without filling up an EC2/fargate instance’s network port

- dynamically processing images using Lambda@Edge & Cloudfront - similar to my first one, but on the fly when requested, instead of ahead of time

0 comments

ovao3y ago

To add a couple more good use cases for Lambda:

- To run something at deploy-time with custom CloudFormation resources. As an example, a Lambda can be invoked during each deployment to run tests. If the test fails, the stack(s) can be automatically rolled back. Tricky to get right and not often the right tool in the bag, but sometimes useful.

- As handlers for CloudWatch events. Useful for forwarding events to third-party log services, or for taking some sort of complex action based on a given event.

AWS is nearly “all in” on Lambda at this point, so it’s a good bet that if you want to hang some kind of task off an AWS service, they’ll give you a hook to fire off a Lambda. From a cost and simplicity perspective this works out well.

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