In serverless applications, I view Lambda functions as a way of providing the glue between services and integration components. It is one of the main building blocks in AWS and enables event-driven architectures to work on a massive scale.

Lambda is great for other uses, which are specified as follows:

• Backend compute: When applications and services need an engine to process business logic. A great example is using functions for the backend of an API. RESTful APIs are event-driven by nature and fit into the request and response model. 
• Web applications: Everything from serverless static websites to more complex apps.
• Data processing: Lambda is perfect for real-time processing and serves to replace batch patterns by running massively parallel processing at the point of data creation. Check out Chapter 10, AWS Automation, where we will look at some of these architectures.
• Chatbots: Integrate a Lambda backend with your Amazon Lex to complement natural language processing with conversation logic and data wrangling systems.
• Alexa Skills: Use Lambda as the brain of your Amazon Alexa Skills.
• Operations and automation: Perform automatic remediation in response to events, run automated and scheduled tasks, and scan your infrastructure to maintain compliance levels.

The use cases are almost endless when you think about it, and I'm sure you might already have some ideas about where you want to use Lambda. Now that we've covered the basics, you should have a fairly good idea of what a function is and some of the things you can use Lambda for. Before you delve into development, let's learn about some important factors we need to take into account in order to keep our functions safe.