Lambda is Amazon’s new event-driven compute service

Continuing to roll out new compute services at an impressive clip, Amazon Web Services has introduced a way for programmers to trigger operations in their AWS deployments without running a full virtual machine, potentially reducing maintenance work and cost. The service, called AWS Lambda, will provide a virtual space for programmers to run scripts or business logic programs that can be activated when some event occurs, such as a user uploading a photo.

Amazon Web Services announced a new service today called Lambda, a stateless event-driven compute service for dynamic applications that doesn’t require provisioning of any compute infrastructure. As AWS’s CTO Werner Vogels pointed out, this will enable programmers to reduce their overall development effort. You simply write the code and define the event triggers, and it will run for you automatically when the conditions are met. This automation should save time and money because instead of running the whole stack for something that may only run infrequently, you can now run it without any resources and it runs automatically. It’s worth noting that in a Hacker News discussion of the new service, one programmer who has had early access to the service indicated it does take some time to get up to speed on this service, but once you do, he can see the potential here for transforming the way programmers use AWS.