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Lambda everywhere.

AWS Lambda introduced server-less computing to the masses. Wouldn't it be nice if you could run the same Lambda functions on any platform, in any cloud? Iron.io is proud to release a set of tools that allow just this. Package your Lambda function in a Docker container and run it anywhere with an environment similar to AWS Lambda.

Using a job scheduler such as IronWorker, you can connect these functions to webhooks and run them on-demand, at scale. You can also use a container management system paired with a task queue to run these functions in a self-contained, platform-independent manner.

Use cases

Lambda functions are great for writing "worker" processes that perform some simple, parallelizable task like image processing, ETL transformations, asynchronous operations driven by Web APIs, or large batch processing.

All the benefits that containerization brings apply here. Our tools make it easy to write containerized applications that will run anywhere without having to fiddle with Docker and get the various runtimes set up. Instead you can just write a simple function and have an "executable" ready to go.

How does it work?

We provide base Docker images for the various runtimes that AWS Lambda supports. The ironcli tool helps package up your Lambda function into a Docker image layered on the base image. We provide a bootstrap script and utilities that provide a AWS Lambda environment to your code. You can then run the Docker image on any platform that supports Docker. This allows you to easily move Lambda functions to any cloud provider, or host it yourself.

The Docker container has to be run with a certain configuration, described here

Next steps

Write, package and run your Lambda functions with our Getting started guide. Here is the environment that Lambda provides. ironcli lambda lists the commands to work with Lambda functions locally.

You can import existing Lambda functions hosted on Amazon! The Docker environment required to run Lambda functions is described here.

Non-AWS Lambda functions can continue to interact with AWS services. Working with AWS describes how to access AWS credentials, interact with services like S3 and how to launch a Lambda function due a notification from SNS.