AWS Lambda execution lifecycle has main phases: initialization, invocation, and shutdown. In the initialization phase, Lambda creates the runtime environment, downloads the code, imports everything needed, and runs the functions initialization code. In the invocation phase, the Lambda will get an input, process it, and produce an output. After the invocation phase, Lambda will go to an ideal state and wait for the next input.

When a startup is in its very early stages, rapid iteration and dynamism are at the top of its priorities. The ability to do so, while maintaining a stable and high-quality product, is a big challenge facing the R&D group. We want to release features as quickly as possible, but this rapid velocity cane cause conflicts when writing in-depth, comprehensive tests.

AWS announced the release of the Lambda Function URLs feature today. In this post, I describe what it is, how it works, and how you can benefit from it. API Gateway and AWS Lambda is a potent combination and lets you build REST APIs without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. API Gateway offers many powerful features out-of-the-box, including: Understandably you pay a premium for these features.

Nowadays, microservice architecture is a pattern that helps to innovate quicker by enabling easier scalability, giving language flexibility, improving fault isolation, etc. Systems built this way also bring some downsides. Moving parts, concurrent invocations, and different retries policies can make operating and troubleshooting such systems challenging. Without proper tools, correlating logs with metrics may be difficult. To overcome these challenges, you need observability.

Every Lambda function comes with 512MB of ephemeral storage in the shape of a /tmp directory. This storage space can be reused across multiple invocations for the same instance of a Lambda function. Each instance of a function has its own /tmp directory and data is not shared amongst different instances of a function.