AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Users of AWS Lambda create functions, self-contained applications written in one of the supported languages and runtimes, and upload them to AWS Lambda, which executes those functions in an efficient and flexible manner.
The Lambda functions can perform any kind of computing task, from serving web pages and processing streams of data to calling APIs and integrating with other AWS services.
The concept of “serverless” computing refers to not needing to maintain your own servers to run these functions. AWS Lambda is a fully managed service that takes care of all the infrastructure for you. And so “serverless” doesn’t mean that there are no servers involved: it just means that the servers, the operating systems, the network layer and the rest of the infrastructure have already been taken care of, so that you can focus on writing application code.
AWS Lambda was the first serverless offering of its kind -- built to relieve cloud users of infrastructure management responsibilities and execute code in response to predefined triggers.
Since the launch of this event-driven computing platform more than five years ago, AWS Lambda has become central to Amazon's cloud strategy and helped shape the state of serverless computing.
"The advantage for developers is that they don't have to worry about the hardware used to execute the applications," said Jean Atelsek, an analyst at 451 Research. "For admins, these systems make life easier, and costs lower, because they don't have to provision resources in advance."
