Serverless Map/Reduce
This is a screenshot of my google search from 2 days ago:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/BNAcSsn.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/BNAcSsn.png</a><p>I've been using Lambda quite a bit, I think it's SO amazingly useful. Tasks that are highly parallelized and CPU intensive can literally be infinitely scaled out. I find it weird that their poster child use case is still always a reactive event like watching S3 and formatting images. There are so many use cases for directly invoking a lambda directly from your code.<p>Imagine a case where you had to parse a million documents with a relatively expensive computation, let's say 250MS per document. Maybe you have a solid machine with a few cores that's running your server, but even then you can't have the server cpu locked for so long, so naturally you'd need some sort of worker server set up. With a good machine and multiple cores, maybe you get 8 running at once. With a lambda, you can forego the worker server altogether. Just invoke a million lambdas directly from your application server, completely parallelized.<p>Theoretically, you've taken something that would take 70 hours and had it run in 250ms without having to set up any additional infrastructure.