Amazon's Lambda service - for geeks only.

Lambda: it's not just the 11th letter of the Greek alphabet – it's an Amazon AWS service that's really pretty cool.lambda.png

Most applications we write require an operating system, a computer, a file system, antivirus and security patches, a way to maintain and upgrade the operating system and software infrastructure as well as systems to maintain the hardware and network infrastructure.

Lambda is different. It's a compute service that just runs code. Amazon takes care of managing and operating everything else. Your Lambda code runs in response to events -- a new file showing up in Amazon's S3 storage facility, or a database event, API calls or even Web requests. Your code runs on a highly available infrastructure where things like capacity planning, logging, monitoring and scaling are taken care of for you.

Companies are using it on everything from real-time image management to ETL functions and triggering analytics as well as automating data collection from Internet of Things  apps.

Currently, you can write applications in Node.js, Java and Python and you're only charged when your code runs (in 100 millisecond increments) – like most AWS services, it's pretty cheap.

There's a quick video that describes Lambda at: https://youtu.be/eOBq__h4OJ4

I'll be putting together a demo of this service and will publish my notes here, if you're interested.