What is AWS Lambda used for?

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service from AWS that runs functions on demand in response to events, without servers to provision or manage. It is a good fit for event-driven backends and APIs, and scheduled jobs and glue code between services.

Yes. AWS Lambda has a free plan. Pay per use: $0.20 per million requests plus compute billed per GB-second, with a monthly free tier of 1 million requests. Provisioned Mode event pollers cost $0.185 per EPU-hour for Kafka sources.

Is AWS Lambda open source?

No. AWS Lambda is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to AWS Lambda include OpenFaaS and Tau.

What are some alternatives to AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda competes with Cloudflare Workers, Google Cloud Run and Deno Deploy. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source AWS Lambda alternatives.

AWS Lambda: features, pricing and alternatives

About AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service from Amazon Web Services that runs functions on demand. Developers upload code and AWS takes care of the servers, operating system and scaling, so there is no infrastructure to provision, patch or keep running between requests.

Functions are commonly invoked by events from other AWS services, by HTTP requests through an API layer, or on a schedule, which makes Lambda a frequent building block for event-driven backends and automation. Billing follows actual usage rather than idle capacity. Lambda is a proprietary AWS service with no self-hosted edition; current runtimes, limits and pricing are documented by AWS.

Key features

Runs functions on demand without servers
Event-driven triggers from AWS services
Automatic scaling with incoming demand
Usage-based billing instead of idle capacity
Tight integration with the AWS ecosystem

Good fit for

→Event-driven backends and APIs
→Scheduled jobs and glue code between services

Tags: aws; serverless; functions; faas; compute; event-driven; cloud

AWS Lambda: questions and answers

What is AWS Lambda used for?: AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service from AWS that runs functions on demand in response to events, without servers to provision or manage. It is a good fit for event-driven backends and APIs, and scheduled jobs and glue code between services.
Is AWS Lambda free?: Yes. AWS Lambda has a free plan. Pay per use: $0.20 per million requests plus compute billed per GB-second, with a monthly free tier of 1 million requests. Provisioned Mode event pollers cost $0.185 per EPU-hour for Kafka sources.
Is AWS Lambda open source?: No. AWS Lambda is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to AWS Lambda include OpenFaaS and Tau.
What are some alternatives to AWS Lambda?: AWS Lambda competes with Cloudflare Workers, Google Cloud Run and Deno Deploy. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source AWS Lambda alternatives.