Gregor Richardson

AWS Lambda is one of my favorite cloud services. The only limits are the imagination and skillset of the developers using it. Common categories of use include event driven processing, batch data processing, log ingest and analytics, and automation of the AWS environment. I've seen Lambda function as the backend for websites, as an engine to customize email delivery campaigns, as a monitor and control for other systems, and as the brain behind trendy online chatbots and Slack bots.

This speed tutorial is for anyone technically savvy enough to have dabbled in AWS but who has been hesitant to explore the heavy duty world of server setup. If you have an existing AWS account and if you're at lease moderately familiar with their web console, these steps can be done in as little as 5 minutes, I promise. But first I'll warm things up with a bit of an introduction to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

For over a decade I've bounced between GoDaddy and NameCheap for all my personal domain and web hosting needs. While those services are easy, they don't provide the scaling or performance to match my current 2019 use cases. As a result I've shifted to Amazon Web Services.

Jekyll is a Ruby based tool for generating static websites and blogs without the need for database using Markdown files or HTML. It's useful for when working within the constraints of a platform that only allows for basic static files. Many use it to create blogs on Github Pages. Static files also mean fast load times and eliminate potential complexities of server side software. In my case I said goodbye to Wordpress and used Jekyll to host this blog directly on S3.

What is AWS Lambda? It is compute service which allows you to execute your code without needing to manage any servers or worry about availability. Each self-contained Lambda file is referred to as a function. These functions can be written in C#, Go, Java, Node.js, Python or Ruby.