Amazon Web Services brings Java support to Lambda

Market-leading public cloud Amazon Web Services today introduced an interesting update to the Lambda event-driven computing service it introduced last year. Now Lambda supports good old Java, and not only the hip Node.js server-side JavaScript framework.

The news answers one question people had about Lambda — how accessible it will be to developers, and how soon. But Amazon isn’t stopping at Java.

“This is the first in a series of additional language options that we plan to make available to Lambda developers,” Amazon Web Services chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post on the news today.

Lambda represents a possible future for computing in a public cloud. The service gives developers a sort of rules engine that abstracts away the underlying computing and storage that’s conventionally required.

And as Lambda becomes available for more languages, it stands to help the Amazon cloud look a bit more attractive than others, like Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. And the model could also entice developers who are used to on-premises infrastructure.

For now, there are new Lambda libraries for Java developers to explore. Barr’s blog post provides an overview.