AWS Lambda is a new compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages compute resources for you. In this session, you will learn what you need to get started quickly, including a review of key features, a live demonstration, how to use AWS Lambda with Amazon S3 event notifications and Amazon DynamoDB streams, and tips on getting the most out of AWS Lambda functions. Speakers: Dean Bryen, AWS Solutions Architect and Andrew Wheat, Senior Developer Media Services BBC

1. ©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved
AWS Lambda: Event-driven Code in the
Cloud
Dean Bryen, Solutions Architect – AWS
Andrew Wheat, Senior Software Engineer - BBC
April 15, 2015 | London, UK

2. Our customers had some relatively simple problems
Maybe only 10 lines of code
Think thumbnailing of an image
or
Validating the format of an address

3. That were solved with pretty complicated solutions
Scaling
Queuing
Deployment
Monitoring
Logging
Patching
Instance upgrades

4. What if every AWS service could generate events?
What if you could react to those events in a really
simple way?

5. Event-Driven Compute in the Cloud
Lambda functions: Stateless, request-driven code execution
• Triggered by events in other services:
• PUT to an Amazon S3 bucket
• Write to an Amazon DynamoDB table
• Record in an Amazon Kinesis stream
• Amazon SNS Message received
• Changes in Amazon Cognito data
• Makes it easy to…
• Transform data as it reaches the cloud
• Perform data-driven auditing, analysis, and notification
• Kick off workflows

6. AWS Lambda – General Availability
• Larger default limits
– 100 concurrent executions
– 1,000 invokes per second
– Increases available via AWS customer service
• Preview label removed
– Updated API based on feedback during preview
– Multiple Lambda functions per Kinesis stream

7. Data Triggers: Amazon S3
Amazon S3 Bucket Events AWS Lambda
Original image Thumbnailed image
1
2
3

8. Data Triggers – Amazon Simple Notification Service
Lambda FunctionSNSCloudWatch
Metric

9. Data Triggers – Amazon Cognito
Lambda FunctionCognito

10. Data Triggers: Amazon DynamoDB
AWS LambdaAmazon DynamoDB
Table and Stream
Send SNS Push
notifications
Update another table

11. Data Triggers – Amazon Kinesis
IoT
Device
Kinesis Lambda DynamoDB

12. Dynamic content generation
based on incoming news text
and images
Real time log
processing for
prediction analytics
Thumbnailing
installation site photos
for mobile use
Real time processing and
recording of inbound traffic from
a range of social media
platforms
Large scale distributed
search across blog
content
Operational
analytics and real
time troubleshooting

13. Mobile Compute

14. Mobile Compute: Building Backends with Lambda
• Request/Response
• AWS Mobile SDK
• Easy Personalization
…for devices
…for end users
AWS LambdaMobile App

15. Event-Driven Compute in the Cloud and for Devices
• Request / response
– Create instantly scalable backends for mobile apps
– Run stateless computations for web apps without servers
– Build cloud-based IoT ecosystems using C/C++ libraries
– Complements the existing asynchronous functionality

16. AWS Mobile SDK
• Build high quality mobile apps quickly and easily.
• AWS Lambda now available in:
– AWS mobile SDK for Android
– AWS iOS mobile SDK

17. Easy Personalization
Which device is she using?
?
Which end user is this?
?

18. Key Benefits

19. No Infrastructure to Manage Automatically Scaling
Fine Grained PricingBring Your Own Code

20. Demo: Synchronous functions with
AWS Lambda

21. What We *Didn’t* Have to Do:
• Provision software or hardware infrastructure
• Plan capacity
• Understand fault tolerance boundaries
• Write code to scale up and out
• Implement monitoring
• Update operating systems or language runtimes
• …

22. Using AWS Lambda

23. Calling Lambda Functions
• Call from mobile or web apps
– Wait for a response or send an event and continue
– AWS SDK, AWS Mobile SDK, REST API, CLI
• Send events from Amazon S3 or SNS:
– One event per Lambda invocation, 3 attempts
• Process DynamoDB changes or Amazon Kinesis
records as events:
– Ordered model with multiple records per event
– Unlimited retries (until data expires)

24. Writing Lambda Functions
• The Basics
– Stock node.js
– AWS SDK comes built in and ready to use
– Lambda handles inbound traffic
• Stateless
– Use S3, DynamoDB, or other Internet storage for persistent data
– Don’t expect affinity to the infrastructure (you can’t “log in to the box”)
• Familiar
– Use processes, threads, /tmp, sockets, …
– Bring your own libraries, even native ones

25. AWS Lambda or EC2 / ECS?
AWS Lambda
• Request-driven
• Prioritizes ease of use –
one OS, default hardware
choice
• AWS owns and manages
the infrastructure
• Implicit scaling; just make
requests
Amazon EC2 and ECS
• Infrastructure rental
• Flexible – choose
instance type, OS,
language, …
• You own and configure
the infrastructure
• Scale by provisioning
instances or containers

26. Java
• You can already call Java programs from
Lambda functions today…
– Java and other languages are automatically included in your
filesystem view…don’t wait to start using them!
– Freezing ensures you don’t pay repeatedly for JVM boot
• We’ll make this even easier with built-in support
for AWS Lambda functions written in Java.

27. ©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved
AWS Lambda

28. • 36bn minutes of video watched in 2012
• Increased a lot in the last two years

29. Media Services
• Part of BBC Digital
• Existed before 2011, Perl system
• 24 Olympics 2012 live video streams
• September 2013 14h for delivery to 30 minutes
• August 2014 30 minutes for delivery to 3
minutes

30. Simulcast
• 24/7 adaptive bitrate streaming, without interruption
• 25 continuous video streams
• 70 continuous radio streams
• 30 temporary radio streams
• 24 temporary video streams
How does my app know where to find the content?

31. Radio and Video Manifests
• Over 20,000 files
• Highly cacheable as they change
about once a month
• Edit by hand? No way!
• Set of scripts that grew over time
• Error Prone
• Not reproducible

32. AWS Lambda
• Configuration is uploaded from SVN to S3
• S3 Notifies Lambda
• Lambda reads the file from S3 and produces each of the 20,000 files
• Lambda puts the resulting files in a different bucket which the CDN
references

33. Micro Services & Continuous Delivery
• 100+ small components
• Build, test, deploy, test, deploy
• Heavier Java components take 30 minutes for deployment
• Lighter JavaScript Lambda components take 3 minutes

34. Summary
• Java based require EC2
• Lambda is another micro service deployment tool
• Quick
• You have probably made use of it

35. Three Next Steps
1. Go to the AWS console to create and test your first Lambda
function. The first 1M requests each month are on us!
2. Use the AWS Mobile SDK and Lambda to quickly create an
instantly scalable mobile app.
3. Use AWS Lambda to add custom logic to S3, DynamoDB,
SNS, Kinesis, or Cognito events…no servers required!

36. LONDON