Lambda can also be used in combination with monitoring platforms such as CloudWatch. We can create alarms and invoke Lambdas when our application usage reaches a certain threshold. The Lambda function can then perform additional analysis of the data being recorded from the application and determine the pattern of the traffic increase or decrease, and the best way to scale the application at hand. Lambdas can do more than just scale EC2 instances like the AutoScaling feature; Lambdas can scale databases instances, create read replicas, manage caching, and so on. 

Essentially, scaling is only the beginning. We can use the Lambda service to continuously monitor streams or logs from our mission-critical applications and enhance the way we manage our applications. They can provide advanced warning of failures or errors in our application, and can perform remediation actions in our infrastructure. Everything will fail, all the time, but with intelligent IT automation with Lambdas, we can make it seem as through that failure never even happened.