{"id":1710,"slug":"lambda-launch-november-2014-serverless","title":"AWS Lambda previewed November 13, 2014; GA April 9, 2015 — code with no servers to provision","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"current","audiences":["kevin","dev","candid-team"],"topics":["web-tech-history","web-infrastructure","cloud-infrastructure-economics"],"reference_body":"**Claim:** **AWS Lambda** was previewed **November 13, 2014**, with general availability **April 9, 2015**. The service lets you run code with no servers to provision — billed by execution time and invocation count.\n\n**Source:** AWS timeline.\n\n**Confidence:** Verified.\n\n**Why this matters for Candid:** Lambda is the endpoint of the metering-granularity story ([[ec2-per-second-billing-october-2017]]). For a small site with a few authenticated form-submit endpoints, Lambda + RDS together can run for single dollars per month — a workload that in 2005 implied a dedicated server.","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[{"slug":"ec2-per-second-billing-october-2017","title":"EC2 per-second billing introduced October 2, 2017 — replacing hourly increments in place since 2006","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"rds-launch-october-2009-managed-db","title":"Amazon RDS announced October 2009 (MySQL first); GA May 31, 2011 — managed DB absorbs admin/backup/failover","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}],"incoming":[{"slug":"research-brief-falling-cost-floor-real-web-functionality-smb-june-2026","title":"Research brief: the falling cost floor of \"real\" web functionality for SMBs (June 2026)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"capex-to-opex-structural-shift-synthesis","title":"The structural shift: capex (server + sysadmin) → opex (managed service, administration included)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"},{"slug":"timeline-three-drivers-converge-2004-2014","title":"Timeline 2004–2014: the decade when each of the three historically-expensive parts independently got cheap","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"},{"slug":"rule-rent-commodity-parts-build-only-differentiated-logic","title":"R3 — Rent the commodity parts (Stripe / Auth0 / Algolia / RDS / Lambda); build only what is genuinely differentiated logic","kind":"rule","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"}]},"created_at":"2026-06-21T13:17:00.499Z","updated_at":"2026-06-21T13:17:00.499Z"}