Learn AWS Lambda with this Cloud Academy course
Do you know Event-Driven Programming?
It’s a common programming paradigm in which the flow of the program is determined by external events that trigger predefined actions. If you have ever written Graphical User Interfaces for Desktop Applications you are probably well aware of the concepts behind it, given that most if not all the most important GUI libraries are all based on the paradigm. Event-Driven applications are not limited to Desktop only, though, as they can be found on the web and of course in the Cloud too. There are so many different use-cases where this approach can be a convenient choice. For example, triggering specific processing when a user uploads a picture or a video, or when he clicks a button, or when the state of an object is changed, and so on.
We would normally tackle situations like that programmatically, using a dedicate framework, yet during the latest AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, Amazon announced a brand new service that is totally focused to this kind of activity: executing code on an Event-Driven basis. You probably have heard of it already, we also talked about it on this blog: it’s AWS Lambda, a PaaS service built on top of EC2 that currently supports Javascript and Node.js but that will likely add more languages soon.
Learn AWS Lambda
Lambda is not particularly complex, but setting it up, and especially setting up IAM rules and security groups, can be tricky. Mostly, it’s a totally new approach to executing code on the Cloud, so we thought it would be worth crafting a full course to help you understand how it works under the hood and how to take advantage of it for your workloads. That’s exactly what our Cloud expert Kevin Felichko did, and we just released this new course on our platform.
The course on learning AWS is split into two parts. The first one is about a theoretical introduction to the service. You will first see a good and thorough overview of what Lambda is and what it aims to. Then Kevin moves on to showing you how Lambda works under the hood and how you can set up and configure your workload there. This first part is followed up by an initial round of questions about Lambda. Each question is followed up by a Teaching Point that will help you learn even more about this new service.
The second part is a practical example to show you a real use-case scenario where a service like AWS Lambda can come in handy. You will see how to set up the service for this particular scenario, and will also see how to use CloudWatch together with Lambda to monitor your workload and get notified when necessary. Another round of real-life scenario based questions will follow this second part and will complete this Lambda tutorial.
