AWS Lambda is a fully managed service that fits into the serverless Functions as a Service (FaaS) category. As we mentioned earlier, this category is a subset of the event-driven compute architecture pattern and is the best way of achieving a serverless architecture. The FaaS model allows us to use, or more accurately rent, a compute share to run a discrete piece of code. This code includes one function that might make up one piece of a larger application.

In AWS, Lambda is the service that provides our FaaS. We can deploy our code and trigger it to run based on a predefined event. To learn about what is involved in this process, let's dig into some basic concepts underlying Lambda functions.