Software is no longer just a tool for most businesses, it is part of their core business to make most of their operation flows work seamlessly - from marketing, sales, manufacturing, even for opening and closing their doors. Technology is something you need to stay up to date and not fall behind, nowadays it improves and changes so fast that businesses need to find the right solutions to help them stay competitive and at the same time be able to deliver technology fast, that scales on demand and in a cost effective way.
With AWS Lambda, a serverless computing model, it will allow you to build more agile applications, innovate and respond to change faster, and be able to scale on demand as needed. It reduces the need of physical servers, capacity planning, management, configuration, maintenance, etc. All of these translate into a cost-effective solution that helps you move forward with the current and future market.
AWS Lambda is not the only Serverless service in AWS, it includes many different services from DynamoDB, S3, API Gateways, to core functions of the system. In this blog, we are going to talk about a leading market serverless computing service, AWS Lambda.
AWS Lambda lets you virtually run any code for your application in a serverless way, this means that it automatically and precisely allocates compute execution power and runs your code based on the incoming request or event, for any traffic - making it very scalable. Yes you hear it correctly! you don't need that on premise or cloud servers running all day long to provide functionality to your pretty website or mobile app that could shock when experiencing high traffic.
But how can Lambda help my business?We already talk about serverless AWS Lambdas and you probably wonder if this service
is the right option for you to implement current or new functionalities.
First let's explore the advantages and challenges of using AWS Lambda:Sometimes legacy applications are hard and expensive to migrate to a different
architecture, or there are just too many challenges to overcome when adding new
functionalities. AWS Lambda makes it easier to set up things to work with many other
services, this allows for more options to take different approaches such as creating
everything from scratch (replicating your system or new developments), moving just some
core functionalities, or just adding new features to your current architecture.
Using AWS Lambda helps businesses in many different ways and to easily understand how it actually works for an organization, let's explore how AWS Lambda and CBQA Solutions helped Auditate bring its ideas into reality, be able to compete in the market and scale to any level.
Not every company has the opportunity to create its apps from scratch, in this case CBQA had the opportunity to develop the platform from an initial concept. We implemented Auditate utilizing a microservice approach with AWS Lambdas as the core. This allowed us to connect with all the AWS services that were needed to implement a scalable solution. By utilizing different AWS services with Lambda at the core, it allowed us to have a more maintainable platform, easier to scale, only pay as you use it, and finally work in parallel with the different services.
CBQA developed a platform for Auditate to help importing businesses organize and
control all documentation related to import and export activities. All modules in this
platform are using AWS services, but the core of the functionality is AWS Lambda, which
drives the APIs, the document processing, the database management, users management,
security, etc. Here are the main 4 core functionalities Auditate has:
As you can see on the architecture diagram, all the AWS services talk to
AWS Lambda, positioning it at the core of the platform.
Using Lambda for core functionalities allows you to expand your platform in the future very
easily, since you only need to concentrate on developing the new functionality and Lambda
will run it. Creating new features that interact with the rest of the system will be much
easier and faster than any other approach.
“Using AWS Lambdas has been our focus since day one, as the market grows, so is our product because we continue delivering new features really fast and without worrying about anything else than just code and deploy”.
Once everything is running serverless, teams (design, marketing, development, etc) can concentrate on continuously delivering new functionality without having to worry about scaling, maintaining and securing the hardware - all of these are taken care of by the serverless approach.
CBQA collaborated with Auditate to make the choice of using AWS Lambdas (microservices approach) from day one, unfortunately this is not an option for many companies. Many companies do not have that option of using Lambdas due to either being hard to migrate from the current cloud provider or their non-serverless architecture does not allow it. The best way to approach serverless, especifically with AWS Lambda, is to start small and think of modules that you can and want to migrate, change, or start your MVP. Then plan, develop, test , and deploy that particular functionality or module. This way you can evaluate the cost, process, ROI and the challenges it presents. Finally you will be able to decide if using AWS Lambda works for your entire application or system. CBQA is here to help whether you are new to AWS or you already have an AWS Environment - let's have a conversation.
