What is AWS Lambda? — UK Software Development Guide
Direct Answer
AWS Lambda is Amazon's serverless compute service. You upload code as a "function" and Lambda executes it in response to events — HTTP requests via API Gateway, file uploads to S3, messages to SQS, or scheduled triggers. You pay only for the compute time consumed — there are no servers to manage, and Lambda scales automatically from zero to millions of invocations.
Aws-lambda in the UK
AWS Lambda running in the eu-west-2 (London) region satisfies UK GDPR data residency requirements. Lambda is particularly well-suited for: webhook processors, scheduled jobs (cron-style), event-driven microservice components, and variable-traffic API backends. UK considerations: Lambda maximum execution time (15 minutes) limits use for long-running processes; cold start latency (typically 100–500ms for Node.js/Python) must be managed for latency-sensitive applications; VPC Lambda functions require careful UK region configuration for data residency.
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