Why Amazon’s New Lambda Cloud Service Is A Huge Deal

The article is "Why Amazon’s New Lambda Cloud Service Is A Huge Deal" and is in part about responding to events and mentions a connection with IFTTT.

Well, without getting to things that are new, there are some related old things! If like the new things, then might also want to look at some of the old things!

There is C. Forgy's RETE algorithm for expert systems where have rule based programming of If-Then statements. Here the logical expression after the 'IF' is in terms of working memory. Then conceptually, continually all the 'IF' statements are evaluated and for the ones that are true the corresponding 'THEN' statements are executed.

There was a programming language to do this KnowledgeTool from IBM Research.

Well, the article is in part about software that responds to events from system management, events from outside the software. So, might let the working memory be changed from some sources of events from outside the IFTTT or expert system software. The working memory that is changed might have some object-oriented ideas, say, with an inheritance hierarchy that can be changed in real-time during execution. Then software executing the If-Then statements might be multi-threaded and use working memory in a way that has database-like transactional integrity and automatic deadlock detection and roll-back of the partially completed but deadlocked (transaction) work that was cancelled.

The same group at IBM Research did that and called it Resource Object Data Manager. The intention was system monitoring and management of server farms and networks.

So, using software something like IFTTT to monitor servers that issue events is old stuff! If like such things, then might look into some of the old stuff.