What Is Going On With Lambda? Five Lambdas for the Agent Era

Hi All,

Chris came across Alexy Grabov's LinkedIn article, What is going on with Lambda?, and we thought we had to do something around it.

When Lambda launched in 2014 the rules were simple: Node.js only, stateless, one request at a time, 60 seconds and done. More languages followed and the limit reached 15 minutes in 2018, but the rest held for over a decade.

In the last twelve months AWS has rewritten them.

"A Lambda function" now means one of five things:

• Event Functions: classic Lambda, renamed in October. Your code doesn't change.
• Web Functions: an ordinary web server, with one environment serving many requests at once and no CPU billed while it waits.
• Durable Functions: checkpointed workflows that can wait for a human and pick up where they left off, up to a year later.
• MicroVMs: isolated sandboxes for running AI-generated code, which suspend and resume with memory and disk intact.
• Managed Instances: Lambda on EC2 in your own account.

Most of this is aimed at AI agents, which spend their time waiting on a model, run for hours, and run code nobody has reviewed.

Is Lambda still "serverless"? And does it matter?

Rick Morgans covers how we got here and why so many people moved off Lambda. Arran Peterson from AWS takes the five in turn: what each one is for, what it costs, when you'd pick it, and the fine print. Then a live demo putting them to work.

5:30pm for a 6:00pm start. Pizza and drinks provided.

See you there!

Rick and Chris

Thanks to our foundation sponsors: Fivecast, Comunet, Snowflake, FIRCY, Fortinet, Megaport, Cloudflare and Infobiz Solutions.

And our ecosystem partners: CORE Innovation Hub and The Innovation Factory.