[jeffasinger]

Essentially this is a way to lets you push all of the weird feature requests your customers might have off into one place.

From a customer point of view, maybe you need to rewrite the path based on the contents of a cookie, or maybe you want to shed certain types of requests in high load scenarios, or maybe there's a buggy upstream application that sends bad cache-control headers, or ...

If the goal is to let the customer specify infinitely complex logic at the edge, a programming language is a good way to do that. Function As A Service is a good billing model for lots of invocations of short, small functions across the customers choice of language.

[thayne]

The unfortunate side effect is that Lambda@Edge at least adds quite a bit of latency that a simpler but less powerful rules based system for header manipulation probably wouldn't.

We experimented with using Lambda@Edge for manipulating a header, but the added latency just wasn't worth it, and we had to come up with a different solution. That was years ago though, so maybe it is better now.