Question

Difficulty: MediumAWS Compute Services

A company is developing a new mobile application backend that performs simple database lookups, with each request completing in under a second. The application's usage is highly sporadic, with long periods of inactivity followed by sudden bursts of user activity. To minimize costs and administrative effort, the company wants a compute solution that requires zero server management, charges only for the exact duration of code execution, and eliminates the responsibility of operating system patching.

Which AWS compute service should the company choose to meet these requirements?

  1. A
    Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances
  2. B
    Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) running on Amazon EC2 instances
  3. AWS Lambda functionsAnswer
  4. D
    Amazon Lightsail virtual private servers

Answer

AWS Lambda functions
AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that runs code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute infrastructure. Since it charges only for the duration of active execution and incurs zero cost when idle, it perfectly aligns with the sporadic workload scenario. Because AWS manages the underlying servers, operating system patching is fully handled by AWS, eliminating that operational burden for the customer.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the workload characteristics and operational constraints.
The workload has sporadic traffic (idle periods), fast execution (<1 second), and requires zero server management and no OS patching responsibility.
This establishes the criteria for evaluating the compute services.
2
Evaluate the pricing and management model of each service.
AWS Lambda is serverless, event-driven, charges only for execution duration, and offloads all OS patching and infrastructure administration to AWS.
Matching these features to the requirements identifies the correct compute service.

Key Concept

AWS serverless compute advantages and shared responsibility boundaries
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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