2016 was an exciting year for AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway and serverless compute technology, to say the least. But just in case you have been hiding away and haven’t heard of serverless computing with AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway, let me introduce these great services to you. AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers, making it a serverless compute service that is event-driven and allows developers to bring their functions to the cloud easily for virtually any type of application or backend. Amazon API Gateway helps you quickly build highly scalable, secure, and robust APIs at scale and provides the ability to maintain and monitor created APIs.
With the momentum of serverless in 2016, of course, the year had to end with a bang as the AWS team launched some powerful service features at re:Invent to make it even easier to build serverless solutions. These features include:
- AWS Greengrass: Run local compute, messaging & data caching for connected IoT devices using Lambda and AWS IoT; https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-greengrass-ubiquitous-real-world-computing/
- Lambda@Edge Preview: New Lambda feature that allows code to be run at global AWS edge locations and triggered in response to Amazon CloudFront requests to reduce network latency to end users; https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-soon-lambda-at-the-edge/
- AWS Batch Preview: Batch computing workload planning, scheduling, and execution across AWS compute services including upcoming Lambda integration as a batch Job; https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-batch-run-batch-computing-jobs-on-aws/
- AWS X-Ray: Analyze and debug distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture, written in Java, Node.js, and .NET deployed on EC2, ECS, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and upcoming AWS Lambda support; https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-x-ray-see-inside-of-your-distributed-application/
- Continuous Deployment for Serverless: AWS services to create a continuous deployment pipeline for your serverless applications; https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/continuous-deployment-for-serverless-applications/
- Step Functions: Using visual workflows as a reliable way to organize the components of microservices and distributed applications; https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-step-functions-build-distributed-applications-using-visual-workflows/
- Dead Letter Queues: Support for Lambda function failure notifications to queue or another notification system
- C# Support: C# code as a supported language for AWS Lambda
- API Gateway Monetization: Integration of API Gateway with AWS Marketplace
- API Gateway Developer Portal: Open source serverless web application to get started building your own developer portal
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-lambda-a-look-back-at-2016/
