Using Amazon Lambda

AWS LambdaAs I mentioned last week, I’m in the process of using Lambda with Elastic Transcoder to automate conversion of m4a files into mp3 files. I spent the weekend writing a few scripts in node.js; here’s what I’ve learned so far:

  1. A Lambda function is a pretty simple thing to write.
    1. There are tons of examples to reference
    2. You can write your functions in 3 languages – javascript (node.js), Java, and Python
  2. Lambda plays nicely with most AWS services
    1. I’m interacting with CloudWatch, SNS and S3… no problems, except for…
  3. IAM/Security can trip you up if you’re not careful
    1. 25% of my debgging time was spent figuring out what permissions I needed to add (without given “wide-open” permissions to my IAM role).

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