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Comment by rememberlenny | Hacker News Reader

I have used Lambda extensively over the past three months in Python, Ruby and Node. The largest game changer for me was discovering Lambda Layers and realizing how I could avoid compiling zip folders to deploy. I’ve loved the iteration speed and performance, and recently have depended heavily on the Lambda + EFS combo.

I purchased the book and was surprised there wasn’t more on the EFS usage, but otherwise the book looks wonderful.

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What you described with Lambda Layers sounds like a thin layer over Lambda container images[0]. What are the benefits to using traditional lambda + lambda layers vs lambda container images?

0. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.h...

For clarification, Lambda Layers is the packaging of a node_module, vendor/gem, or python package folder, and then "sharing" that across various Lambdas, instead of deploying the shared files again and again.

The actual lambda file ends up being a few hundred bytes, because they are literally just one function in a single file.

There is no compiling involved in the Layers after its made once. The only changing part of the Lambda is the lambda_handler.

My understanding is that a custom lambda image is the nuclear option; having everything fit cleanly into a normal lambda archive is the preferred option; and lambda layers are a type of middle ground if you've outgrown one but don't quite need the other.

Have you found a scalable solution to manage layers with infrastructure as code? As soon as I introduced them to my team, they started demanding exploitations of the process and it became a mess. Would love to know the best practices! Also beware of EFS, our applications did some heavy lifting with EFS and we found a bug that broke our stack. Not sure it's completely production ready. Took Amazon well over a year to find it and reimburse :)

Thanks! And that's a good point about EFS, it's something I've found very useful too. I'm planning to add some updates to the book, so I'll put it on my list of things to include.

Thanks for the feedback!

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