One of our strengths at AWS has always been our ability to get primitives into the hands of our customers and observe what they do. In nearly every instance, someone uses these building blocks in interesting ways that we didn’t expect. Sometimes it’s domain-specific innovation, but other times it’s customers working around the limitations of what’s available. When the latter happens, it’s a signal that we need to provide new primitives that enable this pattern – to make it simpler for our customers and abstract away complexity. AWS Lambda is a perfect example. We saw that customers had entire EC2 fleets sitting idle, waiting to run simple functions like writing to a database or processing a file. It was inefficient, and we knew we could do better. So, we challenged ourselves to build a service that allowed our customers to focus on their unique application logic, not on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of provisioning servers, autoscaling, patching software, and logging. And it started with a doc.
As an Amazonian, regardless of role or seniority, there is an expectation that when you have a good idea, you’ll put pen to paper and craft a compelling narrative. These docs take many forms: one-pagers, two-pagers, the infamous six-pager, and of course PR/FAQs – a press release followed by frequently asked questions we anticipate our customers will have, or that our internal stakeholders will (and often do) have. These press releases are internal tools, not shared broadly, designed to ensure we clearly define what we will deliver for customers. And while each of these docs has a different purpose, the rationale remains the same. Writing forces the author to be clear, precise, and detailed. To string sentences together, take a position, and support that position with data. It places the burden on the author to avoid anything confusing or that could be misinterpreted by the reader. It’s hard work. I’ve never seen someone get it right the first time. It takes collecting feedback and revising and then revising again. But a good idea backed by a crisp doc has proven it can produce wonderful products – it’s something we’ve seen over-and-over again from 1-click buying and Amazon Prime to the launch of AWS and Kindle. So today, on Lambda’s tenth anniversary, I’d like to share the PR/FAQ that launched one of AWS’s foundational services. It’s been slightly modified for length, repetition, and readability, but it provides a peek behind the curtain at the customer problems we were observing in the early 2010s, and our vision for serverless compute.