Lambda Web Functions bill for the CPU you actually use, and queue
consumers spend most of their time waiting on something else. So is an SQS
consumer cheaper as a Web Function than as a regular Lambda function?
In my notes on Lambda Web Functions I mentioned that the
runtime contract is: Lambda import()s /var/task/index.js, then waits for
something to accept a TCP connection on AWS_LAMBDA_HTTP_ENDPOINT. The
launch says Web Functions are Node.js only, which I took as a personal
challenge.
AWS launched Lambda Web Functions a few hours ago. You give it a
Node.js app that listens on a port and Lambda runs it as-is behind an HTTPS URL,
with many concurrent requests per execution environment and billing for the CPU
time you actually use rather than wall-clock. There's no handler and no JSON
event. I deployed one, poked around inside it, and here are my notes. tl;dr: It
feels like taking the best of AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Run and Cloudflare Workers
and stuffing them together in a cohesive service.
AWS just announced that S3 event notifications now include
the system-generated tags attached to the bucket responsible for the notification.
This sounds like a small change, but it will enable some useful patterns. It's
also at least the third example of an AWS service offering value-add through
tag enrichment.
The release notes were a bit light on details, so I verified for myself what
tags are (and more importantly: are not) included in events. I also want
to take this as an opportunity to promote EventBridge for S3 object notifications,
as it's not used nearly enough.
AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity seems to have a new, barely-documented, policy
condition key. It's called sts:RoleAuthorizedByIdp and if you're anything like
me (my condolences), that name will pique your interest. It's not super useful
today (unless you're running an OIDC IdP), but its utility will grow as adoption
improves over time. So here's what I've learned so far.
Earlier today, AWS IAM Identity Center launched the ability for server-side
applications to assume roles on behalf of their users. This is a big deal, I've
wanted this exact kind of functionality for years. The docs are pretty sparse
on how it works and what the events look like in CloudTrail, so here are my
field notes, recommendations on whether you should use it today and feature
requests for whichever AWS service team is working on this.
AWS launched Lambda MicroVMs earlier today. They're quite cool, and I
imagine they'll become quite popular quite quickly. Here are some notes on
things I've discovered about them today.
Amazon has deprecated CloudTrail Lake as of 1st June 2026 for new customers. I
assume this is due to lack of uptake. I never got around to properly using it,
and I'm a CloudTrail fan! So I can only imagine not many others used it. In its
place, Amazon recommends that we "explore CloudWatch". I explored
CloudWatch and came away quite disappointed.
I've been interested in micro-transactions for about as long as I can remember.
I've wanted to sell something for a tiny amount of money ever since I learned
about PayPal's micro-transaction support via NearlyFreeSpeech, the hosting provider.
I've finally done it, by combining some of the oldest and newest tech I can think of:
faxes and AI.
I was looking at the execution history for a Step Functions state machine that
is triggered daily by an EventBridge Scheduler schedule. The execution names
caught my eye — they look like UUIDs, they're not UUIDv7, but there's clearly
a pattern. It got me excited in the same way that noticing AWS access key IDs
were similarly-formatted back in 2020. So of course I had
to dig in.