AWS Lambda Adds Mobile Dev Features

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), has moved its AWS Lambda service to full production, with new features for mobile app development.
AWS Lambda, the Amazon cloud compute service, allows developers to provide code that is executed in response events. It takes care of underlying backend details and automatically manages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances (EC2).
Developers create code, called a Lambda, in the Node.js JavaScript framework. It’s executed in response events such as images uploads, notifications, and messages.
AWS Lambda, for example, can instantly create thumbnails of images that are uploaded to Amazon S3 storage.
According to the service’s Web site, “AWS Lambda typically runs code within milliseconds of an incident.” The service automatically manages your compute capacity and spins up the infrastructure to deploy your code. It then runs the code for each event. Each event is handled individually, so thousands of functions can be run simultaneously and performance remains consistent regardless of how frequent they occur.
AWS recently moved Lambda, which was first revealed as a preview at last year’s AWS reInvent conference, to full production mode. This increased the number of concurrent requests that can be submitted from 50 during the preview to 100.
Asynchronous invoke is one of the new features in the production edition. Although the preview was used by developers to create mobile apps it only used a synchronous model that wasn’t suitable for use cases where immediate action was needed with minimal latency.
Jeff Barr, a company executive, stated that the new Synchronous Invoke function “is a great fit to this use case.” In a blog post. “Lambda functions invoked in synchronous fashion using the Mobile SDK get detailed context information as part the request. They have access the following data: application data (name of build, version, package), device data(manufacturer model, platform), as well as user data (the client ID). The mobile back-end is able to respond quickly to requests because functions can be invoked in milliseconds. You can improve the app experience without worrying about hosting or scaling back end code.
AWS Lambda’s production version also includes new triggers such as Amazon Simple Notification Service notifications (SNS) notifications; AWS Mobile SDK for Android and iOS support; a simplified access system; cross-account resource access; an enhanced AWS Management console; the ability to attach multiple functions to one data processing stream; improved metrics and a simplified programming model; and many other features. You can find the complete list of new features here.
Barr promised that there would be more. Barr said, “We are just starting and we have all kinds of cool stuff in our works.” “For instance, you will soon have the ability to write your Lambda function in Java!” You’ll also be able use Lambda functions on your Cognito Datasets to intercept and resolve merge and conflict resolution events.