AWS Lambda - Getting Started

Since seeing the applications of Lambda at AWS Media London and the huge momentum behind it at AWS Summit London 2016 I thought it was time to get some of the basics down here as a jump-off reference along with some helpful links.

Getting started with Lambda is pretty easy and the benefits of 'serverless' infrastructure are quite self-evident (and if not are well described in numerous blogs and articles). AWS is the obvious starting reference place for kicking off:

• AWS Reference Documentation
• Hello World Example

There are a number of other tutorials of how to link up with other AWS products like S3, Kinesis and DynamoDB. I'm going to focus on using Node.js in using Lambda for now. There's a great online course available as well for getting started with Lambda offered by Udemy.

Beyond Hello World, most of the starting examples are derivatives of a thumbnail creation service using S3 from the AWS docs. The typical process is to drop a file onto S3, trigger a Lambda, process the image to scale it using ImageMagick and put the resulting file into a new S3 bucket. 

This is great to start with and there are a lot of good walk through tutorials explaining additional details and jumping off points. I wanted to collect together a couple of those references and take a look at some other ideas around this example and offer some suggestions for smoothing some of the details around getting started.

Following on pretty much directly from the AWS documentation, this tutorial steps smoothly through the same example. This article takes the same example and describes packaging and deployment in more detail using CloudFormation and the AWS CLI (command line interface). It's not quite time to delve into that detail yet, but it's a good reference to come back to later.

Well, this gets us started. Now what I wanted to explore is how to move beyond dropping files into S3 and creating new S3 files and to start using them with a simple web-page.