Preface

The first time I heard about AWS Lambda was from Sam Kroonenburg. Lambda had just been released, but Sam was already excited by its prospects. He told me about execution of functions in the cloud, the potential for automation within AWS, and development of event-driven workflows. It was fascinating and full of endless potential. The thought of being able to run my code without having to provision or look after infrastructure seemed very cool and not a moment too soon. As a software engineer, I always wanted to focus on architecture and code rather than infrastructure, operations, and system management. Here was my opportunity to do so with Amazon Web Services.

After some months, the API Gateway came out and solved one of the biggest problems with Lambda at the time. It became possible to invoke Lambda functions using standard HTTP requests. The dream of creating fast, scalable back ends for applications without having to touch a server was happening right in front of us. The first major serverless project I worked on, started by Sam Kroonenburg, was A Cloud Guru, which grew into a large learning-management system. This platform, entirely serverless, cost very little to run and allowed for quick iteration cycles. It was a lot of fun to work on because we could focus on adding business value and new features without having to worry about infrastructure management or complex operations, and the platform could scale like crazy.