AWS Lambda in Action

AWS Lambda lets you quickly and easily build and run applications on the AWS cloud that automatically run code in response to events. AWS Lambda makes back-end tasks like producing a thumbnail from a new image or processing requests from a mobile app simple to implement, ready for web-scale traffic, and free of the overhead of managing scalability and availability. With AWS Lambda, every interaction between resources is the potential source of an event that can be processed in near real-time by a function hosted by Lambda. This event-driven approach in the back end of your application lets you focus on developing unique features, freeing you from management of infrastructure. With AWS Lambda, the scope of your application is naturally divided in small functions, giving you a reactive architecture and the right approach to adopt microservices.

AWS Lambda in Action is an example-driven tutorial that teaches you how to build applications that use an event-driven approach on the back end. You'll begin with an overview of how AWS Lambda works and move on to expose those functions as web API using Amazon API Gateway. After an introduction to how to approach security, you move on to common examples and patterns that you can easily reuse to call Lambda functions from a web page or a mobile app. The second part of the book puts all those smaller examples together to build larger applications. Learn also how AWS Lambda can be used to manage resources on AWS, react to notifications and alarms from other AWS services, and even use Lambda functions to deploy other Lambda functions, building a new kind of Continuous Integration. By the end of this book, you'll be ready to use AWS Lambda to create applications that take advantage of the high availability, security, performance, and scalability of AWS.