Best for — Serverless Platforms
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Who is AWS Lambda best for?
Quick fit guide: Who is AWS Lambda best for, who should avoid it, and what typically forces a switch.
Sources linked — see verification below.
Freshness & verification
Best use cases for AWS Lambda
- AWS-first teams building event-driven systems with managed triggers
- Backends where integrations reduce plumbing work (events, queues, storage)
- Workloads with bursty traffic patterns that benefit from elasticity
- Organizations with existing AWS governance/IAM standards
Who should avoid AWS Lambda?
- Edge latency is the product (middleware/personalization) and tail latency is unacceptable
- You need minimal cloud coupling and want portability as a primary requirement
- Your workload is sustained, egress-heavy, and better suited to always-on compute
Upgrade triggers for AWS Lambda
- Tail latency and cold start impact become visible to users or SLAs
- Concurrency/throttling issues appear during bursts and require capacity controls
- Spend spikes require workload math and architectural changes (caching, batching)
Sources & verification
Pricing and behavioral information comes from public documentation and structured research. When information is incomplete or volatile, we prefer to say so rather than guess.