Resilience in AWS Lambda - AWS Lambda

Resilience in AWS Lambda

The AWS global infrastructure is built around AWS Regions and Availability Zones. AWS Regions provide multiple physically separated and isolated Availability Zones, which are connected with low-latency, high-throughput, and highly redundant networking. With Availability Zones, you can design and operate applications and databases that automatically fail over between Availability Zones without interruption. Availability Zones are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than traditional single or multiple data center infrastructures.

For more information about AWS Regions and Availability Zones, see AWS global infrastructure.

In addition to the AWS global infrastructure, Lambda offers several features to help support your data resiliency and backup needs.

  • Versioning – You can use versioning in Lambda to save your function's code and configuration as you develop it. Together with aliases, you can use versioning to perform blue/green and rolling deployments. For details, see Manage Lambda function versions.

  • Scaling – When your function receives a request while it's processing a previous request, Lambda launches another instance of your function to handle the increased load. Lambda automatically scales to handle 1,000 concurrent executions per Region, a quota that can be increased if needed. For details, see Understanding Lambda function scaling.

  • High availability – Lambda runs your function in multiple Availability Zones to ensure that it is available to process events in case of a service interruption in a single zone. If you configure your function to connect to a virtual private cloud (VPC) in your account, specify subnets in multiple Availability Zones to ensure high availability. For details, see Giving Lambda functions access to resources in an Amazon VPC.

  • Reserved concurrency – To make sure that your function can always scale to handle additional requests, you can reserve concurrency for it. Setting reserved concurrency for a function ensures that it can scale to, but not exceed, a specified number of concurrent invocations. This ensures that you don't lose requests due to other functions consuming all of the available concurrency. For details, see Configuring reserved concurrency for a function.

  • Retries – For asynchronous invocations and a subset of invocations triggered by other services, Lambda automatically retries on error with delays between retries. Other clients and AWS services that invoke functions synchronously are responsible for performing retries. For details, see Understanding retry behavior in Lambda.

  • Dead-letter queue – For asynchronous invocations, you can configure Lambda to send requests to a dead-letter queue if all retries fail. A dead-letter queue is an Amazon SNS topic or Amazon SQS queue that receives events for troubleshooting or reprocessing. For details, see Adding a dead-letter queue.