Four Benefits of Service Oriented Architecture with AWS Lambda

Service Oriented Architecture is used by many Java web application development company and also used by large known companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Uber. But can this architecture pattern work for your business? In this article, we will understand Service Oriented Architecture, and how AWS Lambda in combination with Python can be leveraged to easily build scalable, cost-efficient services.

What is Service Oriented Architecture?

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) isn’t a new terminology, but it's in used since several decades. It gained popularity in recent years with the increasing demand of web-facing applications. SOA in simpler terms is a large application broken into many small communicating applications. This follows several best practices of software engineering such as de-coupling, separation of concerns and single-responsibility architecture.

Implementations of SOA vary in terms of granularity, i.e. starting from deploying few services that cover large areas of functionality to many dozens or hundreds of small applications in what is termed microservice architecture. Like many good practices in software engineering, it is an investment that requires extra planning, development and testing.

Why AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda is a service offered by the Amazon Web Services platform. DevOps and IT administrator teams can simply upload their application code to AWS Lambda and configure the service provisions of different AWS products like S3 (Simple Storage) buckets, DynamoDB tables, and data in Amazon Kinesis streams. AWS Lambda streamlines the process of building and managing applications and reduces the amount of time spent by IT on infrastructure management to support applications. AWS Lambda also manages the provisioning and different servers to run the code, making the user to focus only on developing the code to run and a few configuration options to define the context in which the server runs.

Benefits of AWS Lambda

• Apart from freeing up time for DevOps teams by automatically managing the AWS services, AWS Lambda also helps in saving application development costs. With AWS Lambda’s flexibility, elasticity, and on-demand power of the cloud, it charges users on as used basis only. You only pay for the services used; nothing more, and nothing less.
  
• It also serves as an economical option for application development. AWS do not require any upfront investments compared to the traditional method of building and maintaining applications in-house, which includes purchasing servers, server operating systems, and need more money for operating and cooling costs. With AWS, you are only billed for the time the code runs (measured in increments of 100 milliseconds).
  
• AWS also helps in saving time of writing application code as it is compatible with many major programming languages. It also offers support for third party libraries, making it easy for DevOps team to build and write application code on-site and upload on AWS Lambda. AWS management console also provides numerous functionalities to build common application processes for change notification, file compression and image conversion.
• It’s pre-built groups of code for common application processes and support for a variety of programming languages helps in saving time of DevOps teams to research and develop the code. Making it a huge advantage to deploy development projects faster, saving money on different projects. It also eliminates the need to manage and monitor application processes as AWS does that out of the box.