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AWS Lambda Concurrency: Protecting Downstream Systems from Traffic Spikes

Understand Lambda concurrency, reserved concurrency, throttling, and how concurrency limits can protect databases and other downstream services from sudden traffic spikes.

AWS Lambda Concurrency: Protecting Downstream Systems from Traffic Spikes

One of the important characteristics of AWS Lambda is automatic scaling.
When more requests arrive, Lambda can create additional execution environments to process them concurrently.
This is useful for handling variable workloads, but unlimited scaling is not always desirable.
The real question is:
What happens if Lambda scales faster than the database or downstream service can handle?

What Is Lambda Concurrency?

Concurrency is the number of requests that a Lambda function is processing at the same time.
For example:
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1 request
↓
1 Lambda execution

10 requests
↓
10 concurrent executions

100 requests
↓
100 concurrent executions
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