Can AWS Lambda Speak to external Internet Services?

Question

With the ground breaking revolutionary fully managed functional programming support by AWS; can AWS lambda speak to external internet / systems for external communication.

The idea / motive is if AWS Lambda use the NodeJS SDK for services PubNub, Pusher - it would be nice to offload the handler aspect of the real time communication.

Answer 1

The short answer is yes. Since Lambda runs in a Node sandbox, there's nothing stopping you from bundling up something like request and using it from within your function. However, there are a few limitations to consider:

1. There is a hard upper limit of 60 seconds for execution, so if your requests take too long your function could timeout

2. Lambda places some restrictions on network capabilities:

   Inbound network connections are managed by AWS Lambda, only TCP/IP sockets are supported, and ptrace (debugging) system calls are restricted.