AWS Lambda — Enhance the Functionality With Lambda Layers
Back in Nov 20014, Lambda functions brought in a revolution in the world of cloud computing. That introduced us to serverless computing in the true sense. The concept of independent pieces of computation that are fast and easily affordable, provided a new paradigm.
Independent computing units were great. But soon, people realized that pieces of their code were really not independent. There was a lot that they needed to share. We need some common data structures, and utilities across the application. How do we provide them in Lambda functions?
That led to some duplication of code. People found innovative ways of working around this — by having a unified code in one place, that is configured to deploy into several different units. So the same code was deployed into different lambda functions. That did work to an extent. But then the deployment complexity blew up.
People thought of deploying everything for every lambda function. That works as well. But as the libraries and dependencies grew in size, we had to pay the price for it — in memory usage as well as the computation time.
Considering all these problems, AWS introduced the concept of Lambda Layers — in the reInvent 2018.
