As of today, no. Probably coming in the future though. I got the impression that eventually all Aws services will emit events.
After reading the description of AWS Lambda, I expected SQS to be first in the list of event sources. Huh.
Wouldn't that be kind of unnecessary, when it's not too tough to write an SQS-reactive client?
Starting with S3 fills a gap as there is AFAIK otherwise no way to start processing based on changes to S3, without writing a rather wasteful program to list the resources, maintain state, and hunt for differences.
The meaning of "lambda" in computer science is functionally (no pun intended) similar enough to what amazon is selling that people learning programming and nontechnicals or even IT pros who work with programmers will inevitably be confused.
It seems like you're seriously saying that people who are studying computer science lack the ability to tell the difference. Naming the product something that closely resembles its functionality seems like a great idea for a product. It's still Amazon Lambda, and I think it's very unlikely that people will simply refer to it as "Lambda." If CS students find themselves hopelessly confused by this product name, they ar…
I'm not arguing they will not be able to tell the difference... I'm arguing it will cause confusion at some point, and maybe that's a negative externality of naming this product "Lambda." Nobody said "lose a generation of CS students."
And, as I've noticed in the past, searching for "y combinator" + any language name will often keep useful results away until you finally block this site. I'm not sure if this is still comprehensively true, but it seemed so to me at one point. So there is a very real impact on search results that can happen.
It seems like you're seriously saying that people who are studying computer science lack the ability to tell the difference. Naming the product something that closely resembles its functionality seems like a great idea for a product. It's still Amazon Lambda, and I think it's very unlikely that people will simply refer to it as "Lambda." If CS students find themselves hopelessly confused by this product name, they ar…
I'm not arguing they will not be able to tell the difference... I'm arguing it will cause confusion at some point, and maybe that's a negative externality of naming this product "Lambda." Nobody said "lose a generation of CS students." And, as I've noticed in the past, searching for "y combinator" + any language name will often keep useful results away until you finally block this site. I'm not sure if this is still…
I was being overly sarcastic there, sorry about that. I just don't think this will ever be a problem for people, if anything Amazon adopting it may help people learn more about it, all the same, I guess it could go either way, I'll quiz some candidates in a few years to see if they ran into Lambda as a stumbling point :)
What does this mean to application development? Is it something revolutionay?
No idea, for the time being the only supported language is JS. I'm trying to understand if I can run ruby applications by glancing here and there... Didn't had the time to look into it yet, but everyone seems very excited about it.
You can't, yet. They have plans to add "other languages" on their roadmap.
I’ve had a chance to use the service for a couple of weeks. My quick summary review is that it’s a little tricky setting up the IAM roles and security groups, but once you have that going, it works great! I see a ton of potential here in transforming the way people use AWS. I also put together the Netflix use cases in the keynote so if you have any questions I’ll try to answer them!
Do you know if you can respond to events from SWS or SQS?
Currently the only services supported are S3, DynamoDB, and Kinesis. Seems like a no-brainer that they'll be adding other services though.
I'm excited for this. This replaces what I wanted to use SQS for. SQS always felt like too much vendor lock-in to me to justify not using something like RabbitMQ or Beanstalkd. With Lambda, the resource consuming the queue is managed for me - that is huge. Also, the pay by time model is perfect for this - instead of managing when to stop/start resource intensive instances, I don't even have to think about the problem…
> *the resource consuming the queue
Are you referring to kinesis as the queue here? Sqs/sns are not (yet?) supported as event generators for lambda.
How is it different from Google App Engine? Conceptually the two seem very similar to me, that is, developers do not have to worry about the underling infrastructure at all---just write code and deploy.
Yes, exactly. Someone needs to write the code, that's all; I'll do it myself if necessary, but if someone else gets there first all the better.
Watch out for the limit on the number of concurrent invalidation batches. Youll probably want to scan for "pending" PUT objects and try aggregate them in to an invalidation batch.
Good point. I guess this would need to be "S3 PUT event triggers code which adds object name to a list and starts a timer"; "timer expiry triggers code which issues a batch invalidate for the list (and empties the list)".
I wonder if there's any good way to generate that timer expiry event...