What is the purpose of AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda's primary purpose is to enable serverless computing capabilities, which allows users to run code in response to events without needing to provision or manage servers. This model allows developers to focus on writing the application logic rather than worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

With AWS Lambda, you can execute code in various programming languages without managing the execution environment. It automatically scales to meet demand, meaning it can handle many requests simultaneously without any prior setup. This scalability, combined with the event-driven architecture, makes it an efficient choice for building applications that respond to changes in data or user activity.

The other options, while relevant to AWS services, do not describe the core function of AWS Lambda. Running virtual machines pertains more to services like Amazon EC2, managing container orchestration relates to services like Amazon ECS or EKS, and storing and retrieving object data is primarily the role of Amazon S3.