And The End Game Is … Serverless Scripts: Meet Lambda

We have grown up with servers, and can only see them as the solution to provide services. But, the end game is to remove these complex computing machines and replace them with scripts. With our server infrastructures, we often setup complex databases and use files to store data in a structured way — but often we just need temporary storage of files, and, increasenly, just JSON objects to reflect our data. And so adisk on a server is often wasteful of our precious data resources, and where inexpensive data buckets are often a good solution for both short-term and long-term storage.

In the public cloud, too, we pay for our data and our compute by the hour, but why not by per nanosecond of compute time? Servers are thus computationally inefficient entities and run complex operating systems to just run one or two exposed services.

One solution is to use AWS Lambda, and where we run scripts which are invoked by events, and where we pay for the compute requirements for the script, rather than for the compute requirements of a server. In many circumstances it is the automation of tasks that would often be done with PowerShell and Python on servers that is the core advantage of using Lambda. Once tested, the script can help to automate key elements of the operation of the business.