Amazon Lambda takes the administration out of cloud computing

At its AWS re:Invent cloud computing conference today, Amazon announced AWS Lambda, a way of performing computing in the cloud in response to events without the need for virtual machines, compute instances, or any kind of administration.

The usual model when performing computation in cloud services is to create some kind of a persistent application, such as a Web server on a virtual machine. Sometimes the developer manages everything on the VM. Sometimes aspects of this are abstracted away—Azure's Web roles, for example, leave management of the base operating system and server up to Microsoft, letting developers focus solely on the Web content—but those persistent deployments, with their time-based billing, have become the basic model of cloud computing.