AWS Lambda

AWS's serverless compute service — pay-per-invocation function execution with managed runtime, no server provisioning. **Now mounts S3 buckets as POSIX file systems via Amazon S3 Files** (May 2026), turning Lambda functions into ordinary file-I/O consumers of S3-resident data. Supports Python, Node.js, Java, Go, Ruby, .NET, custom runtimes. Default 15-minute max execution; 10 GB memory ceiling; 50 MB deployed package or 250 MB unzipped.

Lambda eliminates the per-machine ops layer for event-driven and request/response compute — a function fires on an S3 PUT, an HTTP request, a SQS message, a CloudWatch event, etc. The 2026 S3 Files integration closes the long-standing gap where Lambda code couldn't read large S3-resident datasets without explicit `s3.get_object()` translation in every handler — now `open('/mnt/data/file.parquet')` works directly. Significant for serverless ML inference, file-conversion pipelines, on-demand log analysis, and any agentic-AI tooling that needs ephemeral compute over S3 data.

Event-driven processing on S3 PUTs, request/response API backends, on-demand serverless ML inference reading S3-resident model artifacts via S3 Files, file-conversion pipelines, scheduled jobs via EventBridge, agent-tool execution for AI orchestration platforms.