Diving into AWS Lambda: An Intro to Serverless for Admins

Speakers: Bryson Tyrrell

Level: Advanced, Lecture

Excerpt: Automation through scripts and small apps is an everyday part of most admins’ days. Running this automation, for many, comes with the extra overhead of maintaining systems to run it. These can be spare Macs or virtual machines dedicated to cron jobs or web servers, and those systems will need maintaining. If you’re an AWS customer, there is another way to run your code without the hassle of an entire OS around it: Lambda!

Description: Automation through scripts and small apps is an everyday part of most admins’ days. Running this automation, for many, comes with the extra overhead of maintaining systems to run it. These can be spare Macs or virtual machines dedicated to cron jobs or web servers, and those systems will need maintaining. If you’re an AWS customer, there is another way to run your code without the hassle of an entire OS around it: Lambda!

Lambda is a service from Amazon that enables you to run your code in the cloud without provisioning or managing virtual machines to do so. With Lambda, you can run your automation not only on schedules (just like with cron or launchd), but on events triggered by a wide swath of Amazon’s other services that all tie together.

In this session, I’ll be diving into how to get started using Lambda functions using Python for my examples. The topic I’ll be covering are:

  • An overview of Lambda
  • AWS services that work with Lambda
  • IAM Permissions
  • Writing a CloudFormation/SAM template
  • Deploying your Lambda functions
  • Debugging your Lambdas

    By the end you should come away feeling more empowered to start exploring the ways Lambda can help you build a more automated environment without the hassle of managing your own infrastructure!


    About the speaker

    Bryson Tyrrell (Twitter: @bryson3gps) – Systems Development Engineer II – Jamf

    Bryson Tyrrell is an IT professional from the Twin Cities. He works at Jamf on the Cloud Engineering team on automation and services for Jamf Cloud. In past years he has presented at the Jamf Nation User Conference, Atlassian Summit, Penn State MacAdmins, and MacADUK. You can normally find him in the MacAdmins Slack @brysontyrrell.

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