AWS Lambda - sync vs async

Question

I've been playing with Lambda recently and am working on creating an API using API Gateway and Lambda. I have a lambda function in place that returns a JSON and an API Gateway endpoint that invokes the function. Everything works well with this simple setup.

I tried loadtesting the API gateway endpoint with the loadtest npm module. While Lambda processes the concurrent requests (albeit with an increase in mean latency over the course of execution), when I send it 40 requests per second or so, it starts throwing errors, only partially completing the requests.

I read in the documentation that by default, Lambda invocation is of type RequestResponse (which is what the API does right now) which is synchronous in nature, and it looks like it is non-blocking. For asynchronous invocation, the invocation type is Event. But lambda discards the return type for async invocations and the API returns nothing.

Is there something I am missing either with the sync, async or concurrency definitions in regards to AWS? Is there a better way to approach this problem? Any insight is helpful. Thank you!

Answer 1

You will have to use Synchronous execution if you want to get a return response from API Gateway. It doesn't make sense to use Async execution in this scenario. I think what you are missing is that while each Lambda execution is blocking, single threaded, there will be multiple instances of your function running in multiple Lambda server environments.

The default number of concurrent Lambda executions is fairly low, for safety reasons. This is to prevent you from accidentally writing a run-away Lambda process that would cost lots of money while you are still learning about Lambda. You need to request an increase in the Lambda concurrent execution limit on your account.