AWS Lambda: Logic and Data Abstraction for your Business Processes

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We, like a lot of companies, have ridden the Internet cloud wave like veritable surfers looking for adrenaline-fueled rushes off the Pacific coast. It has led us straight into strategic applications, such as data integration and business intelligence projects for many of our clients without the hassle of owning or maintaining any hardware infrastructure for ourselves.

Many of our clients cannot go a workday without using some form of Enterprise cloud solution such as Salesforce, Zoho, or HubSpot. However, a fair number of these cloud solutions are not fully customized to accommodate all of their business’s processes. We also find that our clients use multiple cloud systems for various tasks or departmental work and these applications don’t communicate with each other effectively out-of-the-box.

To overcome these challenges, we use Amazon Web Services (AWS), and it offers a few different options for us to tackle these unique use cases:

  1. Standalone virtual servers. AWS calls them EC2 instances and allows us to build integrations or data flows on these standalone virtual servers.
  2. App cluster on a virtual server. If we feel like a full server is too much horsepower for a project – perhaps equal to using a broad brush for a narrow stroke – then we could call on a service offering AWS Elastic Container Service which sandboxes our projects on the same EC2 instance and allows us to build out many clones in order to scale to demand of use.
  3. Serverless abstractions. Using one of the fastest growing computing abstractions aptly named “serverless,” AWS offers Lambda – a way to run simple and usually quick programs which could do anything from automating backups to processing several tasks triggered by dynamic user interaction with your website.

Serverless architectures offer us numerous benefits over old server implementations.

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  1. Cost of this service is astronomically low in comparison. We can have Lambda perform 1 million operations per month before we even begin to pay, and after that at a very affordable rate.
  2. Scales quickly to match almost any demand. Say, your website is hit with a surge of traffic made up of users who want to sign up for updates on the new product you just launched. If that system were designed around Lambda, it would have no trouble handling each and every request without flinching.
  3. Flexible triggers. Lambda functions can be triggered by a variety of sources – anything from clicking a link to an Amazon Alexa callout to a timer during the day – and can affect data in almost any destination (after a correct security configuration on the destination). These advantages are huge given the need for separate applications and systems to “talk” with one another.

So, if you can already begin to see how Lambda could bring higher efficiency to your business processes and challenges, please contact us to learn more. We would greatly enjoy discussing how to save you money and time, as well as brainstorm exciting and new possibilities to transform your business.