Unable to install pandas on AWS Lambda

I would advise you to use Lambda layers to use additional libraries. The size of a lambda function package is limited, but layers can be used up to 250MB (more here).

AWS has open sourced a good package, including Pandas, for dealing with data in Lambdas. AWS has also packaged it making it convenient for Lambda layers. You can find instructions here.

I have successfully run pandas code on lambda before. If your development environment is not binary-compatible with the lambda environment, you will not be able to simply run pip install pandas -t /some/dir and package it up into a lambda .zip file. Even if you are developing on linux, you may still run into compatability issues.

So, how do you get around this? The solution is actually pretty simple: run your pip install on a lambda container and use the pandas module that it downloads/builds instead. When I did this, I had a build script that would spin up an instance of the lambci/lambda container on my local system (a clone of the AWS Lambda container in docker), bind my local build folder to /build and run pip install pandas -t /build/. Once that's done, kill the container and you have the lambda-compatible pandas module in your local build folder, ready to zip up and send to AWS along with the rest of your code.

You can do this for an arbitrary set of python modules by making use of a requirements.txt file, and you can even do it for arbitrary versions of python by first creating a virtual environment on the lambci container. I haven't needed to do this for a couple of years, so maybe there are better tools by now, but this approach should at least be functional.

If you want to install it directly through the AWS Console, I made a step-by-step youtube tutorial, check out the video here: How to install Pandas on AWS Lambda