How to share data among many AWS Lambda functions?

Question

I have 8 different AWS Lambda functions that need to share some common data. (like common configuration for database, etc)

Answer 1

There is no in-built technique for sharing data between Lambda functions. Each function runs independently and there is no shared datastore.

You will need to use an external datastore -- that is, something outside of Lambda that can persist the data.

Some options include:

• Amazon S3: You could store information in an S3 object, that is retrieved by your Lambda functions.
• Amazon DynamoDB: A fully-managed NoSQL database that provides fast performance. Ideal if you are storing and retrieving a blog of data, such as a JSON object. Your Lambda function would access DynamoDB via standard API calls. For extreme performance, you could use DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX).
• AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store: Provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management.

The above options are fully-managed services, so you don't need to run any extra infrastructure.

There are other options, such as Amazon ElastiCache, but they would require additional services to be running.

Answer 2

Depending on the nature of configuration you can decide on using different storage options.

If the configuration doesn't change often and mostly static you can use the following options,

• Amazon Systems Manager Parameters Store
• Embed configuration as a part of code

If they are changing often you can consider,

• AWS DynamoDB
• AWS S3

Note: Depending on your use case you can also consider these configurations as parameters to these Lambda functions.

Answer 3

I will add my 2 cents answer :

• use lambda-layer (50mb) for persistent share data over function invocation
• use EFS (ec2, within vpc) for persistente share data over any aws service

the lambda temporary memory (default 512mo extand recently to 10 gb) in ephemere only for current evocation.