AWS Lambda is quickly becoming an indispensable resource for building systems in the cloud. It fits in nicely for several utility use cases, such as running code each time an object is dropped into an S3 bucket, but it can also be used to construct entire applications. Lambda lends itself well to the microservices mentality, which is an important piece of the DevOps puzzle. A microservice is a small, fully independent component of an application. Microservices generally have a dedicated code repository and a dedicated data store so that they can be deployed in isolation from any other related services. By decomposing your architecture down to the individual function level, you can maximize your compute resources by configuring, deploying, and scaling each function separately.