AWS Lambda and the Serverless Cloud

Lambda manages capacity planning, provisioning, auto scaling and updates without interventention

You get all these features but you loose control over platform, you have to use AMAZON OS

The idea of lambda is out sourcing your compute, so that you can focus on your application

Lambda is a function as a tool service or FAAS

WHY LAMBDA?

Use Cases

·      ETL Jobs: These are data driven jobs, which take in some kind of S3 files, something from external service like a DB and perform some kind of operations on it.

·      API(API Gateway):it provides the front end to lambda function,so that you can accept http request, send responses without having to have a webserver

·      Mobile backends: Either as a api or directly from AWS sdk on your mobile device , depending upon how you would like to develop

·      Infrastructure Automation: You can use it to make your infrastructure smarter. I would like to use lambda as a smart glue for the infrastructure because it ties in well with other AWS services, thus making it really easy to develop little pieces of automation

·      Data validation: with Dynamo DB, you can use it as  storage procedure

AWS Lambda – How It Works

 Under the hood

When using lambda, you are using containers that are running on EC2 instances. These EC2 instances are not accessible by you. In terms of management and administration, they download your code from lambda and run it inside isolated container.

So it looks to you that you have isolated machine, even though there maybe many lambda functions executed at the same time on that machine

These containers force resource isolation, so you are only allowed to use the amount of RAM you have configured and they enforce 100ms execution limits for the purpose of billing and also the time outs.

Once created the lambda function, you ca set time outs and at the end of the time out container will be killed regardless of your process

 Anatomy of an application

·      Code- your application consists of code and any dependencies of the code such as libraries

·      Event- event that comes from external source

·      Output-Output is what your functions provides whether it send it to external service or returns it as a\the output of the function

 Event Sources

In the above anatomy of application, we discusses Events as part of an application

There are many event sources. Some of them are:

·      Schedules: You can use schedules similar to cronjob

·      S3 Events: which hand information about new file, updated file or delete file in to lambda

·      DyanmoDB streams:  is another way you can interact dynamo with lambda. When change is made to DyanmoDB, that change is given to lambda function to trigger

·      Kinesis streams: are similar to dyanmoDB streams but they can be added to arbitrary services using kinesis SDK

·      SNS topics: are simple notification service for messages that come from web tools or any other sources

·      API gateway: Is the mapping between http request that might be coming in & events sent to your lambda functions

·      SDK invocationsL From any AWS SDK, you can invoke a standard lambda function

Accessing Amazon CloudWatch Logs for AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda automatically monitors Lambda functions on your behalf, reporting metrics through Amazon CloudWatch. To help you troubleshoot failures in a function, Lambda logs all requests handled by your function and also automatically stores logs generated by your code through Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

You can insert logging statements into your code to help you validate that your code is working as expected. Lambda automatically integrates with CloudWatch Logs and pushes all logs from your code to a CloudWatch Logs group associated with a Lambda function, which is named /aws/lambda/<function name>.

You can view logs for Lambda by using the Lambda console, the CloudWatch console, the AWS CLI, or the CloudWatch API.

Using AWS Lambda with AWS CloudTrail

You can enable CloudTrail in your AWS account to get logs of API calls and related events history in your account. CloudTrail records all of the API access events as objects in your Amazon S3 bucket that you specify at the time you enable CloudTrail.

You can take advantage of Amazon S3's bucket notification feature and direct Amazon S3 to publish object-created events to AWS Lambda. Whenever CloudTrail writes logs to your S3 bucket, Amazon S3 can then invoke your Lambda function by passing the Amazon S3 object-created event as a parameter. The S3 event provides information, including the bucket name and key name of the log object that CloudTrail created. Your Lambda function code can read the log object and process the access records logged by CloudTrail. For example, you might write Lambda function code to notify you if specific API call was made in your account.

In this scenario, you enable CloudTrail so it can write access logs to your S3 bucket. As for AWS Lambda, Amazon S3 is the event source so Amazon S3 publishes events to AWS Lambda and invokes your Lambda function