Why would a developer use AWS Lambda? In a word, simplicity. AWS Lambda—and other event-driven, “function-as-a-service” platforms such as Microsoft Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and IBM OpenWhisk—simplify development by abstracting away everything in the stack below the code. Developers write functions that respond to certain events (a form submission, a webhook, a row added to a database, etc.), upload their code, and pay only when that code executes.

In “How serverless changes application development” I covered the nuts and bolts of how a function-as-a-service (FaaS) runtime works and how that enables a serverless software architecture. Here we’ll take a more hands-on approach by walking through the creation of a simple function in AWS Lambda and then discuss some common design patterns that make this technology so powerful. Read more..