AWS Lambda: Resilience under-the-hood

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AWS Lambda comprises over 80 services working together to provide the serverless compute service that it offers to customers. Under the hood, many of these services are built on top of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, provisioned within Availability Zones. However, AWS Lambda is a Regional service. By Adrian Hornsby (Principal System Dev Engineer) and Marcia Villalba (Principal Developer Advocate).

This means that customers use Lambda services from the Region level and its services are designed to be resilient to impairments that the underlying Availability Zones might have.

The articles discusses:

  • The role of Availability Zones
  • How to prepare for failures
  • How Lambda tests its response to an Availability Zone impairment
  • How AWS Lambda uses AWS FIS
  • How to recover your applications rapidly from Availability Zones failures

This article discusses static stability, a mechanism that is used by AWS services such as Lambda to build resilient Regional services. It also discusses how AWS takes advantage of the same services and infrastructure as customers. It shows how Lambda uses multiple Availability Zones and services like AWS FIS to build highly available services and improve its recovery time from unexpected failures to only a few minutes without human intervention. Nice one!

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Tags aws distributed apis app-development serverless