AWS Lambda turns 10
AWS Lambda turns 10: A rare look at the doc that started it
I posted this last week on LinkedIn.
🤓 This is amazing and a great read. The PR/FAQ process at Amazon requires deep thinking and patience, but it works and is the reason so many of our biggest innovations have even happened. This one in particular is really well written and a great reflection of the process.
🤔 I honestly can't believe it's only been 10 years with AWS Lambda. It seems so embedded into my way of thinking when it comes to building anything at all. It's the first kind of compute I consider, and it usually takes me wildly farther than I ever expect.
👷♀️ At AWS I've had the chance to work with customers who are using AWS Lambda at scale. It's completely changed the way these customers think about provisioning compute and developing powerful application in the cloud that serve millions of users and … bazzilllions of requests.
Serverless isn't dead. It's not even a teenager. We're just getting started!
I still find myself thinking about how profound a thing AWS Lambda is, and that it feels like something that has been around for much, much longer. It reminded me of going on a job interview not long after the launch where someone asked me "What's the most interesting thing in tech you are tracking today?" and I replied "probably serverless, whatever that is." I didn't get the job.
PR/FAQs
Werner's article isn't just about AWS Lambda turning 10. In the article, he shares the (slightly redacted/edited) original PR/FAQ for the service. It's a really interesting peak into the Amazon process for innovation. I'm always excited when folks talk about how their ideas gain traction and become a reality. The PR/FAQ process at Amazon seems to work and has been responsible for some incredible advances.
Go read this one. It's quite interesting!
1. What is Lambda?
Lambda is a secure, reliable and scalable service for running stateless applications in the AWS cloud. Lambda is ideal for developers who want to “just run some code” but have limited expertise or investment in cloud operations and do not want the management and operational overhead of owning a server pool. Lambda manages and scales the servers required to host and execute application code for developers, allowing them to focus on their application logic and stay productive by focusing on the problems they’re trying to solve.
You can see right there… it's made of servers!