I have a very vague memory of a 2013-era meeting with my then-colleague Tim Wagner. The term serverless did not exist, but we chatted about various ways to allow developers to focus on code instead of on infrastructure. At some I recall throwing my arms skyward and indicating that it would be cool to simply toss the code into the air and have the cloud grab, store, and run it. After many more such meetings, Tim wrote a PRFAQ proposing that we build a platform that did just that, and in 2014 I was able to announce AWS Lambda – Run Code in the Cloud.
From Startup to Enterprise It is often the case that startups, with no installed base to worry about and the need to innovate, are the first to take a chance on something new such as Lambda. While that certainly did happen, I was pleasantly surprised to find that established companies—up to and including enterprises—were just as quick to jump in. After a bit of experimentation, they quickly found ways to build event-driven applications that supported critical internal use cases. I took this as an early indicator that Lambda would be a success. It was easy to see how quickly our customers felt a new sense of empowerment: they could move from idea to implementation, and from there to realizing business value, more quickly than ever, while still building their systems in a scalable and composable way.
Today, over 1.5 million Lambda users collectively make tens of trillion function invocations per month. These customers use Lambda for file processing, stream processing (in conjunction with Amazon Kinesis and/or Amazon MSK), web applications, IoT backends, mobile backends (often using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Amplify as well) and to support and power many other use cases.