AWS Lambda as an Application Load Balancer target?

Question

At AWS’ 2018 re:invent, AWS announced that Lambda functions can now be the target of Application Load Balancers (documentation here).

I just want to ensure that I understand AWS previous offerings (e.g., my current setup) correctly — that is, if AWS API Gateway is setup to proxy to an AWS Lambda function, AWS already spins up / balances requests, correct?

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 29 '18 at 20:53

That's correct - technically API gateway handles all of the load balancing for you against any newly provisoned or warm lambda functions. But many people (ourselves included) wanted to use ALB's for lambda as we could perform the following routing:

if request.url ~ /node-app:
  use nodejs-application target group
else if request.url ~ /lambda-app:
  use lambda function target group

So we can now mix and mingle both EC2 and Lambda based microservices across the same hostname, whereas previously they had to be on seperate hostnames (one pointing to ALB, other to API Gateway)

Got it -- thank you for the example / motivating use-case – Dan Nov 29 '18 at 21:36 — Dan, Nov 29 '18 at 21:36

AWS Lambda as an Application Load Balancer target?

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