AWS has announced that Lambda is getting a new capability that will help improve the throughput of event-driven applications.
Provisioned mode for Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) Event Source Mapping (ESM) allows users to configure dedicated polling resources, allowing events to be processed with lower latency, handle sudden traffic spikes, and maintain precise control over event processing resources.
According to Amazon, SQS is often used as an event source for Lambda functions, and though it automatically handles queue polling and function invocation, customers with specific performance requirements have requested more control over polling behavior so they can better handle spikes in traffic.
This new provisioned mode is based on event pollers, dedicated resources that can handle unexpected traffic patterns. Admins will be able to configure a minimum and maximum number of event pollers, each of which represents a unit of compute that manages queue polling, event batching, and filtering prior to invoking the Lambda function.
Setting a minimum number ensures that applications can maintain their baseline processing capacity, while setting a maximum limits total processing throughput to prevent overloading downstream systems.
Each individual event poller can handle up to 1 MB per second of throughput, 10 concurrent invokes, or 10 SQS polling API calls per second. Together, they can scale up to 1000 per concurrent executions per minute, which is over 3x faster than normal, and provide up to 20,000 concurrency, which is 16x higher than normal.
This new capability is available now in all AWS Regions and pricing will be based on the number of event pollers provisioned and the duration they are provisioned for.
