Last month marked the 10-year milestone of AWS Lambda, a leading serverless service offered by Amazon. When presenting a project proposal, Amazon’s standard practice is to draft a press release (PR) to showcase the envisioned service and its benefits to prospective customers. While this approach is widely known, the actual documents are typically kept confidential. However, on the occasion of AWS Lambda’s 10-year anniversary, Dr. Werner Vogels, AWS CTO, decided to share the document for public viewing.
The internal project presentation document outlined ambitious plans, including support for Java, Node.js, Python, and Ruby, as well as the ability to run binaries directly (initially only supporting Node.js and gradually adding more languages for self-managed runtimes). The billing model was structured around invoicing every 250ms (later refined to 100ms granularity), with an initial promise of a free quota per month. The document also included the official website URL at https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/, which remains active to this day.
Furthermore, the document detailed various anticipated conditions, such as maximum code execution duration, with Vogels acknowledging early feedback from customers wanting to run long tasks on Lambda that eventually evolved into batch jobs, or concerns about initial latency issues or extended code run times.
Vogels highlighted the diverse formats of internal project presentation PR documents at Amazon, ranging from single-page summaries to longer, multi-page reports. In the case of AWS Lambda, the document was notably lengthy.
Source: All Things Distributed
**TLDR:** AWS Lambda celebrated its 10th anniversary with the revelation of an internal project presentation document, showcasing ambitious plans, language support, billing details, and anticipated project conditions, while emphasizing the variety of formats for internal PR documents at Amazon.
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