What are the main components of a Lambda function?

0-2 years experience

1. 1If you need to process an S3 upload with a Lambda, which parts of the function definition do you have to configure?
2. 2What happens if you set the handler name incorrectly in the Lambda console?
3. 3How would you increase the memory limit for a Lambda that’s timing out on a simple task?

2-5 years experience

1. 1Your Lambda started showing higher latency after a recent code change. Which components would you inspect first and why?
2. 2You added a new layer to a function and it now fails to start. What could be wrong with the layer configuration?
3. 3A Lambda invoked by API Gateway is returning 502 errors. Which configuration pieces might be causing the failure?

5-8 years experience

1. 1Design a strategy to minimize cold‑start latency for a high‑traffic Lambda that uses a large runtime and several layers.
2. 2How would you architect a Lambda that needs to access multiple VPC resources while keeping startup time low?
3. 3When scaling to thousands of concurrent invocations, which limits in the Lambda components become bottlenecks and how would you mitigate them?

8+ years experience

1. 1Your organization is migrating a monolith to serverless with Lambda. How would you decide what belongs in the handler versus shared layers for long‑term maintainability?
2. 2Across several teams you need a shared library for Lambdas. What governance model would you put around layers, versioning, and IAM roles?
3. 3If you must support both Node.js and Python runtimes for the same business logic, how would you structure the Lambda components to avoid duplication and simplify deployment pipelines?