As a Serverless computing service, Lambda already saves hundreds of thousands of dollars for many companies out there. While traditional server-based infrastructures usually lead to overprovisioning and waste, the Serverless pay-per-use model enables cost-effective cloud spending. Nevertheless, there are still more cost-saving opportunities that many development teams miss on AWS Lambda. Optimizing Lambda functions can be time-consuming, though.
We recently wrote about whether API Gateway can act as a Load Balancer. The answer is yes and, in many cases, they are substitutes for each other. But how should we choose which one to use? In this article, we will dive into more details on how these two types of HTTP networking services compare, using the AWS services as a base level: API Gateway and Application Load Balancer (ALB). Both are highly-scalable services to a point that scalability should not be a concern for most use cases.
The most common API architecture on Serverless backends is not necessarily the most scalable and resilient option. Many developers take for granted that an AWS Lambda processing external requests will require an API Gateway endpoint connected directly to it. One of the best options to decouple a Lambda function and an API Gateway endpoint is by using an SQS queue. Requests come into API Gateway, which are sent as messages to SQS.
Roadmap.sh is a quite popular Github repo providing community-driven guidelines for professionals willing to join or develop a software career. From Backend to Fullstack to DevOps. I missed some details there about Serverless environments and thought about sparking a discussion around this. Perhaps these ideas can mature and eventually become a contribution to the repository.
About 90% of all Lambda functions monitored by Dashbird on AWS Lambda are running Nodejs and Python runtimes. Is this purely a reflection of the general popularity of these programming languages?
From the development and operations side, launching a new software application can be quite challenging. Deciding which tools to use, how to organize the task pipeline, managing collaboration among team members, monitoring performance and potential issues after launch, etc. It’s not easy to get it done right. Dashbird recently went through all of this. Behind the scenes, our amazing development team worked really hard to overcome all challenges and deliver the best value to our users.
TL;DR: yes, API Gateway can replace what a Load Balancer would usually provide, with a simpler interface and many more features on top of it. The downside is that it doesn’t come cheap. Load balancers have been one of the most common ways to expose a backend API to the public or even to an internal/private audience. API Gateways seem to provide the same functionality: map and connect HTTP requests to a backend service. So, are they the same or are there any differences?
The most common integration type for AWS API Gateway is with Lambda functions. The API service can integrate with virtually any other service that accepts HTTP requests, though. This opens up possibilities to use the API Gateway as a proxy to database queries, without any compute layer such as a Lambda function. The direct integration between API and database is perfect when Lambda serves only as an intermediator.
Cost-efficiency is one of the main pillars of the Serverless Well-Architected framework. Read-intensive applications can save money and improve efficiency by using cache systems. AWS Lambda’s internal memory could be used as a caching mechanism. A Lambda container remains alive after an invocation is served, even if it stays idle for some time. Whatever was loaded in the container’s memory will remain there for the next invocations.
Dashbird, centralised observability and incident detection platform for serverless applications. Team Dashbird is proud to announce that we have achieved the AWS Lambda Ready designation, part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Service Ready Program. This designation recognizes that Dashbird’s serverless monitoring and debugging platform has demonstrated successful integration with AWS Lambda.
