Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Using Amazon Lambda with other services

Amazon Lambda integrates with other Amazon services to invoke functions or take other actions. These are some common use cases:

Depending on which service you're using with Lambda, the invocation generally works in one of two ways. An event drives the invocation or Lambda polls a queue or data stream and invokes the function in response to activity in the queue or data stream. Lambda integrates with Amazon Elastic File System and Amazon X-Ray in a way that doesn't involve invoking functions.

For more information, see Event-driven invocation and Lambda polling. Or, look up the service that you want to work with in the following section to find a link to information about using that service with Lambda.

You can also use Lambda functions to interact programmatically with other Amazon Web Services using one of the Amazon Software Development Kits (SDKs). For example, you can have a Lambda function create an Amazon S3 bucket or write data to a DynamoDB table using an API call from within your function. To learn more about Amazon SDKs, see Tools to build on Amazon.

Listing of services and links to more information

Find the service that you want to work with in the following table, to determine which method of invocation you should use. Follow the link from the service name to find information about how to set up the integration between the services. These topics also include example events that you can use to test your function.

Event-driven invocation

Some services generate events that can invoke your Lambda function. For more information about designing these types of architectures , see Event driven architectures in Serverless Land.

When you implement an event-driven architecture, you grant the event-generating service permission to invoke your function in the function's resource-based policy. Then you configure that service to generate events that invoke your function.

The events are data structured in JSON format. The JSON structure varies depending on the service that generates it and the event type, but they all contain the data that the function needs to process the event.

Lambda converts the event document into an object and passes it to your function handler. For compiled languages, Lambda provides definitions for event types in a library. For more information, see the topic about building functions with your language: Building Lambda functions with C#, Building Lambda functions with Go, Building Lambda functions with Java, or Building Lambda functions with PowerShell.

Depending on the service, the event-driven invocation can be synchronous or asynchronous.

For more information about how Lambda manages error handling for synchronously and asychronously invoked functions, see Error handling and automatic retries in Amazon Lambda.

Lambda polling

For services that generate a queue or data stream, you set up an event source mapping in Lambda to have Lambda poll the queue or a data stream.

When you implement a Lambda polling architecture, you grant Lambda permission to access the other service in the function's execution role. Lambda reads data from the other service, creates an event, and invokes your function.