Just two days ago I was jumping through a lot of hoops (maintain state on S3, subscribe to public SNS topics) just to schedule a Lambda function, as explained here. If I knew all these problems were to be solved in a day, I would just wait! In re-Invent 2015 event AWS announced scheduled event support for Lambda functions.

After tweaking around a little bit with the sample I set my schedule like this which will run first day of every month at 10:00:

cron(0 10 1 * ? *)

That’s all there is to it for a monthly schedule. Reliable and no need for my state management workarounds. So the final code becomes as simple as sending an email when invoked:

Resources

• AWS Lambda Update – Python, VPC, Increased Function Duration, Scheduling, and More
• Documentation on scheduling