AWS makes serverless compute system Lambda available for all processors

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will now offer the option of configuring existing functions for AWS Lambda on x86 or ARM/Graviton2 processors, which the company said will help save capital by running more efficiently on the Graviton 2 architecture and paying less for the time it runs. AWS Lambda is a serverless computing platform for the AWS platform, which allows developers to write and execute code without provisioning or managing servers. Tasks like scaling RAM, compute resources etc. are managed automatically. Danilo Poccia, the Chief Evangelist at AWS, said in a blog post that running Lambda functions on Graviton 2 processors will help in 19% better performance and 20 % lower costs. He also claimed that using ARM/Graviton2 architecture will provide a 34% price-performance improvement.  

The functionality has been offered in the availability zones of Sydney, Singapore, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Ireland, London, North Virginia, Oregon and Ohio. In India, it will be offered through the Mumbai availability zone. 

Lambda traditionally charges based on the number of requests for functions and the time taken for the code to be executed. “For functions using the Arm/Graviton2 architecture, duration charges are 20 percent lower than the current pricing for x86. The same reduction also applies to duration charges for functions using Provisioned Concurrency,” said Poccia.  

Provisioned Concurrency is a feature in Lambda that AWS introduced in late 2019 to keep functions initialised and ‘hyper-ready to respond in milliseconds’. This feature could prove beneficial while implementing latency-sensitive functions or interactive services such as the functions in the backend for web and mobile applications.

Additionally, workloads that perform many input/output applications can experience lower execution time and lower costs. “This is particularly useful now that you can use Lambda functions with up to 10 GB of memory and 6 vCPUs. For example, you can get better performance for web and mobile backends, microservices, and data processing systems,” said Poccia.  

The Lambda functions can be managed using the AWS Serverless Application Model and the AWS cloud Development kit. It will also be supported by Lambda partners such as Check Point, AntStack, Cloudwiry, Coralogix, Thundra and others.