AWS Lambda can now run a standard Express, Next.js, or Fastify server without any code changes.
Amazon added a new Lambda mode called Web Functions that accepts ordinary HTTP servers instead of the usual event-handler format. Developers deploy the same code they run locally with a single CLI command, and Lambda handles scaling, routing across regions, and billing. Each execution environment can handle up to 128 concurrent requests, and AWS only charges for active CPU time rather than the whole time a request sits open. It sits alongside the original Lambda model, now renamed Event Functions, and a separate sandboxed mode called MicroVMs for running untrusted code.
This matters because serverless platforms have long forced a trade-off: event-driven models that are cheap but awkward for ordinary web code, paired with billing that often penalized I/O-heavy tasks like streaming AI responses or waiting on a database. Amazon's move narrows the gap between Lambda and platforms built for standard servers, such as Cloudflare Workers or Vercel's functions, without asking developers to rewrite anything.
It's also a quiet admission that plenty of developers never wanted the original event-driven Lambda model for web traffic in the first place. Lambda Web Functions launches in five regions on Node.js 24 for Arm64 chips only, so the promise of running anything anywhere still comes with real limits.