Recently at work I worked on a project using Amazon AWS Lambda. This is a cool concept. Amazon calls it serverless computing, but really what it is, is abstracting the server so that you can just focus on a small task that needs to run.

In this case we had a rest endpoint that just stores some data in a database.  If we think about a traditional Spring Boot Microservice we would probably do Spring Data JPA, point it at a mysql DB, and then have some rest controllers that talk to a service tier which persists the data. With Spring Boot this isn’t much code, but you still have some embedded Tomcat Server and a fair amount of ceremony for doing something very simple. After building the app you will need to deploy it to Elastic Beanstalk instance or else an EC2 Nano Instance or something similar. That is a lot of DevOps overhead to do something very simple. With Lamdba we can create a simple class that takes a pojo java object (Jackson style). With Lambda you don’t have Hibernate, you are just dealing with raw JDBC but when you are just inserting 1 Row into a Database you don’t really need am object relational mapping. You then use Amazon’s API gateway to send any requests to an endpoint to the lambda function and you are all good to go.

That got me thinking S3 now has the ability to serve an S3 bucket as a website, so you could drop an angular app into an S3 bucket and serve that up and then point it at API Gateway which then hits a Lambda and talks to an RDS instance. If your site didn’t have much traffic it would be a super cheap way to host it as Lamdba is billed based on how much compute time you use and in our case our task runs so fast I am not sure we will even break out of the free tier with all the traffic we get. You could run an entire site with no server instances provisioned which is cool. In reality I think as the app grew it would be hard to manage as separate lambda functions and you would benefit greatly from a proper framework like Spring, but for something very small and light this seems super cool. The other neat thing about Lambda is the wide language support you can use, so I wrote my Lambda in Java and my boss just made a Lambda to do some logging that was written in Node. It is a super cool concept worth checking out.