Cloud services. The whole world right now runs on the cloud.
As part of our project, we were tasked to convert a proprietary software that is originally designed as a desktop application to a serverless cloud-based software. We are realizing this by utilizing the AWS Lambda function.
In CS493, we were taught to use GCP, the Google Cloud Platform, which is a competitor of AWS. Although I got the gist of how a cloud platform could be utilized, I must say that GCP had somewhat a better user interface and documentation than AWS and it was also easy to deploy. AWS requires a lot of set up and many more steps to work through to achieve the goal.
Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code using their cloud computing power. The concept of Lambda functions though is based on Events and Triggers. So, an event is a JSON-formatted document with data for a Lambda function to process. Then it converts the data from the event to an object and passes into the code that runs a function using the cloud computing power. Each Lambda function will have a handler, which is the method in your function that processes events. The way I understand it, it is like the “main” function of your Lambda function that helps to separate different components of your function and run them in a sequence you designate and return your desired output at the end.
Once you understand all of this, you can begin investigating how you can incorporate other cloud services that AWS offers with Lambda functions. You can begin handling streams from S3 bucket, which is the data storage offered by AWS and using S3 as triggers to a Lambda function. Similarly, you can do the same streaming and trigger with DynamoDB, which is AWS’s NoSQL database service and many more other AWS cloud services.
Finally, to make this project successful, it really boils down to understanding and designing your software architecture properly, understanding what is essential to be included as a Lambda function and to reduce latency due to communication or calling APIs between functions, storage, database and clients. And this is what our team is really focused on!
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