Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO, recently unveiled the internal design narrative that initiated the AWS Lambda project. The release of the PR/FAQ that sparked the development of one of Amazon's most popular services offers a "peek behind the curtain" and highlights the initial vision for serverless computing at Amazon.
The internal document, annotated by Amazon's CTO, details the origins of AWS Lambda, beginning with the challenges faced by customers managing EC2 fleets that often sat idle while awaiting tasks like writing to a database or processing files. It also describes how the serverless platform emerged, starting with a "compelling narrative" that promoted the concept of "easily running any code as an AWS-operated scalable, secure, and reliable cloud service." Vogels writes:
Lambda, driven by the needs of our customers, has evolved quite a bit in the last decade. When you read this PR/FAQ, you'll notice some things that have changed (e.g., 1ms billing granularity and support for functions with 10 GB of memory), and a handful of ideas that eventually turned into full-blown features.
Vogels reminds readers that Amazon has a long-standing tradition of crafting internal "press releases" to articulate what will be delivered to customers clearly. These documents require authors to be precise and thorough, supporting their ideas with data and ensuring clarity to avoid any confusion. In a separate article, Jeff Barr, VP and chief evangelist at AWS, highlights how the service began and the continuous improvements made each year:
I have a very vague memory of a 2013-era meeting with my then-colleague Tim Wagner. The term serverless did not exist, but we chatted about various ways to allow developers to focus on code instead of on infrastructure. At some I recall throwing my arms skyward and indicating that it would be cool to simply toss the code into the air and have the cloud grab, store, and run it. After many more such meetings, Tim wrote a PRFAQ proposing that we build a platform that did just that.
The purpose of sharing the annotated initial narrative goes beyond celebrating the anniversary, as Vogels explains:
It's a reminder that while we try very hard to be thorough, we are not omniscient, and the goal of writing is not perfection. The goal is to get products into the hands of our customers, watch how they use them, make adjustments and innovate along the way.
The 10-year-old document emphasized the vision of enabling mobile backends and embedding scripting for various AWS services—such as custom CloudWatch actions or custom video transcoder rules—using Lambda "under the hood." Customers with these use cases would implicitly adopt the new service. In the article "Ten Years of AWS Lambda," Marc Brooker, distinguished engineer at AWS, describes some of the initially overlooked challenges and writes:
We've written a lot over the years about optimizing tail latencies for Lambda, but in a lot of ways the median latency was a much bigger deal for customers and somewhere we've invested just as much. Especially customers building microservice and SoA architectures, where median latencies stack up.
Barr also highlights an ongoing shift toward composability and AI:
Over time I can see that serverless applications will continue to make increasing use of reusable, prebuilt components. Aided by AI-powered development tools, a lot of new code will focus on connecting exiting components together in new and powerful ways. This will also boost consistency and reliability across applications.
The annotated Lambda PR/FAQ is available on Werner Vogels' website, while the original unannotated version is accessible as a PDF file.
