Chapter 6. Lambda the orchestrator

If there’s one thing you take away from this book, it should be an understanding that a compute service such as Lambda is the heart of serverless architecture. You used Lambda in chapters 3 and 5, so you have a feel for it already. This chapter explores Lambda in more detail. It looks at core concepts and investigates design of functions. We explain features such as versioning and aliases and go over important design patterns such as async waterfall. We also continue to add features to 24Hour Video as we turn it into a full-fledged application.

6.1. Inside Lambda

Serverless compute services like Lambda are as big a shift for cloud computing as S3 was for cloud storage. If you think about it, the two are similar. S3 deals in objects for storage. You provide an object and S3 stores it. You don’t know how, you don’t know where, and you don’t really care. There are no drives to concern yourself with and no such thing as disk space. You can’t over-provision or under-provision storage capacity in S3.

6.2. Programming model

6.3. Versioning, aliases, and environment variables

6.4. Using the CLI

6.5. Lambda patterns

6.6. Testing Lambda functions

6.7. Exercises

6.8. Summary