How AWS lambda supports different versions of NodeJS

Question

Recently AWS released the processing service, lambda. It can be triggered in milliseconds and only supports NodeJS now.

I'm curious about how can they implement the resource isolation. If they use something like docker, it may take a few seconds to start a container. If they run the NodeJS code directly, how can they support different version of NodeJS? It will be the big problem if you want to support other programming languages.

Answer 1

According to the docs, Lambda currently (at the time of this writing) supports only v0.10.32. In the future they will likely have an option when creating the cloud function specify the language and version. Lambda will ensure it runs in the correct execution environment (which, by the way, is probably not Docker).