To use Pusher's presence channel each client must be connected through a backend authentication system. While Pointer doesn't actually have any login based authentication it still needed a backend system to connect users to the proper channel.

A small function was built that only gets called when a user first joins a session. After the user is authenticated they can communicate directly with other clients on the same channel. This made the authentication code the perfect candidate for a serverless function. Using AWS Lambda through Netlify's Functions feature made it a breeze to host.

Useful for personal projects where I have extremely low traffic. Scalability not taken advantage of for personal projects because of lack of funds.

If using Node.js, always paired with the "serverless-http" NPM package, so that I can code it as an Express app, not having to code according to AWS Lambda handler style.

Used equally as often as Google Cloud Functions, depending on where the rest of the tech stack is hosted.

We're moving almost the entirety of our backend processes into Lambda. This has given us vast cost savings in terms of pure infrastructure billing - and time worrying about platform and scale. This move has also made our architecture almost entirely event-driven - another huge benefit as our business itself is inherently event-driven.

I mostly use AWS Lambda for triggering DevOps-related actions, like triggering an alarm or a deployment, or scheduling a backup.

I haven’t gone totally “serverless” and I’m not planning to go 100% serverless anytime soon.

But when I do, AWS Lambda will be an important element in my serverless setup.

PrometheanTV uses various Lambda functions to provide back-end capabilities to the platform without the need of deploying servers. Examples include, geo lookup services, and data aggregation services.