Containers and Serverless Recommendation Guide
AWS Lambda
Since you selected "I would like to just run code” we recommend AWS Lambda as the best place for you to start.
What is AWS Lambda?
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs code as a highly available, scalable, secure, fault tolerant application function. Lambda abstracts the underlying compute environment and allows you to focus primarily on application development, speeding time to market and lowering total cost of ownership. With AWS Lambda, you can run your code in response to events from over 200+ services, or invoke it via traditional approaches like HTTP calls.
Why are we recommending AWS Lambda?
AWS Lambda can scale automatically from zero to hundreds of thousands of functions in real time, with built-in security postures. With AWS Lambda, you can take full advantage of building on the most trusted, reliable, and secure cloud provider as AWS Lambda manages almost all server management tasks on your behalf including hardware, software, networking and facilities management, data source integrations, and provisioning. That's why every month AWS Lambda has over a million monthly active customers who generate over 10 trillion invocations.
While this is our recommended starting point, other services could also suit your needs and you can always try a different service if your use case changes or if AWS Lambda does not seem optimal for your use case.
Frequently Asked Questions
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What type of app artifacts can you bring to the service?You can upload your code as a zip file, or a container image.
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Where can you run your application outside of an AWS region?AWS Lambda’s own managed capacity in AWS regions.
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What class of applications does the product support?Web services, event-driven applications, data processing, and data streaming.
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How does the product charge for usage?
With AWS Lambda, you only pay for the compute time you use - by the millisecond - instead of provisioning infrastructure upfront for peak capacity. For more information on AWS Lambda pricing, please visit AWS Lambda pricing.
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Can I use AWS Lambda outside of AWS?AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda supports traditional programming languages which guarantees a high degree of portability of the code. The value that AWS Lambda provides lies in its serverless execution environment and in the integration with events from other AWS services. The highly managed nature of AWS Lambda allows customers to think about their code and not about the infrastructure. Running an AWS Lambda application as-is outside of AWS would not benefit from automated scaling, high availability, security patching, built-in fault tolerance, or out of the box 200+ service integrations.
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When should I use AWS Lambda as opposed to Amazon ECS?AWS Lambda is a function deployment whereas Amazon ECS is a container orchestrator. AWS Lambda is ideal for applications that run on-demand in 15 minutes or less and/or you want to pay only for the capacity that is used. AWS Lambda uses an event-driven model and takes on more of the work to scale, secure, and ensure the availability of your workload. AWS Lambda is only available in AWS Regions. Amazon ECS is ideal if you have tasks running longer than 15 minutes or need to run code outside of AWS Regions. Amazon ECS provides opinionated experiences for things like networking and observability but can be customized to your needs. Amazon ECS has multiple deployment options including serverlessly on AWS Fargate, on Amazon EC2, on AWS Outposts, and on AWS Anywhere for on-premises workloads.
Let's get started with AWS Lambda
Get started with AWS Lambda
You can trigger Lambda from over 200 AWS services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, and only pay for what you use.
AWS Lambda resources
Access detailed documentation, whitepapers, tutorials and learning paths around AWS Lambda.
Serverless workshops
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Determining the total cost of ownership
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AWS Lambda customer stories
See how leading organizations worldwide are using AWS Lambda to run their most sensitive and mission-critical applications.