5 ms·

AWS Lambda is cool and all, but aren't people doing the math on this? Lambda seems like a really expensive way to deliver almost anything. Likewise, the AWS API

AWS Lambda is cool and all, but aren't people doing the math on this? Lambda seems like a really expensive way to deliver almost anything. Likewise, the AWS API Gateway is expensive, but at least provides some additional capabilities. Lambda seems like its profitable niche would be very small; limited computing environment, very high cost (relative to almost every other way to host an API), and having to learn a whole bunch of new APIs and processes to make it all spin. Am I missing something?

scrollaway 10y ago
What makes you say Lambda is more expensive than things like EC2? Obviously lambda is a hammer, not a swiss army knife - you shouldn't shoehorn it into your app just because it's the new tech on the block. But the use case isn't niche at all. We're using lambda for our service to ingest and process Hearthstone replays. An HTTP POST is sent to the API gateway, this triggers a lambda which parses a 0.5-2MB file, scrapes the data in it and stores data in the db + converts it to another format. The whole process takes 3-6 seconds. Lambda lets us easily scale to dozens of requests per second without having to worry about anything other than the DB server. Our frontend/app servers don't need to be touched. The alternative would be to provision and manage a lot of EC2 instances to handle the load. We'd have to worry about provisioning them dynamically so that it's economically viable. We'd have to manage the load balancing ourselves. Lambda's been a huge time saver. PS: Let it be known that Lambda only supports python 2.7, not python 3, and that really frickin sucks. Get your shit together, Amazon.
- emjr 10y ago
  "Let it be known that Lambda only supports python 2.7, not python 3, and that really frickin sucks. Get your shit together, Amazon." Node 4 support came, what, a month ago? It's pretty ridiculous.
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    I specifically don't understand the Python 3 situation. They support Python 2, it can't be that complicated to have a separate Python 3 runtime.
  - joobus 10y ago
    There is no significant benefit to python 3 over python 2.
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      Except that it is the way forward and many people choose to write python3 compatible code.
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      You're wrong, and it's irrelevant anyway. Our app is in Python 3. Having to support Python 2 just because lambda doesn't support 3.x is a pain.
    - nameless912 10y ago
      Unicode....? I mean, that's reason enough. Python 2's string processing suuuuuuucks.
    - timlyo 10y ago
      Asyncio? https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html
- rckclmbr 10y ago
  Do you leave your database server publicly open (but password protected obviously), or can you use IAM policies for this as well?
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    A quick google search of more 3-letter-acronyms than there are in the US government yields this: - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/vpc-rds.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/vpc-rds.html - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/access-control-identity-based.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/access-control-...
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  I've got (virtual) servers all over the place. I run my tiny little "needs a minute" tasks on one or more of those. It's nice, I guess to make it a wholly isolated thing, but I rarely actually want to go to the trouble to design it to be isolated. My little jobs often need at least some of the rest of my production environment to be available (database, logs, libs, something). Making a Lambda thing just for those things seems like something I'd rarely want to go to extra effort for. But, if building on a very large scale with strict isolation requirements for your individual tasks it would make sense. Which is the niche I'm talking about; maybe it's just bigger than I assume it is.
d4mi3n 10y ago
AFAIK Lambda is the only way to react to events on S3 buckets. A lot of what I've seen it used for is as a mechanism for kicking off a workflow off of a new item in S3.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  SNS can be consumed from anywhere not just Lambda.
- adzicg 10y ago
  you can push S3 events to SQS and then consume it anywhere (eg we had file converters running on Heroku, listening to S3 events through SQS) Likewise, Lambda can execute events from SNS, Cloudwatch Events, Dynamo and a lot more, including the Amazon workflow system.
nostrademons 10y ago
I think the appeal of Lambda is that most services get zero-to-low usage, and so something which is "pay only for usage" may be a net win over dedicated computing resources if you use it for the right parts. I've had a number of startup ideas that went nowhere, and it would've been handy to test & demo them without springing for the full $17/month for an EC2 t2.micro instance. Usually they have some key aspect that's prevented me from running them on Lambda (eg. you can't exactly run a hacked Node.js binary on Lambda, and sending push notifications from it requires going through SNS and adopting its API), but if I could run arbitrary code & third-party packages and pay for only the computing time I use, it's an attractive proposition. In general you use AWS for convenience anyway - if you're concerned about minimizing costs, you can sometimes get 10x price/performance ratios by moving to dedicated hosting.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Really $17 for a micro? Baby gce machine is $4.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    Yup. AWS prices suck, in general. If it weren't for the large (multi-terabyte) dataset I need for my current project that they're hosting for free on aws-publicdatasets, I'd probably switch to Google Cloud. I may yet switch, which illustrates the danger of relying on proprietary APIs like Lambda.
  - vacri 10y ago
    google micro (1 cpu, 0.6GB ram): $0.006/hr amazon nano (1 cpu, 0.5GB ram): $0.0065/hour https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ in both cases, +disk, +traffic Not exactly a crippling difference.
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      Except google gives you a discount just for using the instance. Amazon requires prepayment
AReallyGoodName 10y ago
I've found Lambda to be really ridiculously fucking cheap. We moved image resizing onto it and saved thousands a month. Don't compare the cost of Lambda per 100ms to the cost of a virtual machine per month since Lambda only charges as you use it. You'd have to have the CPU pegged at 100% usage to make that a fair comparison. Mind you even if you took the cost of Lambda per 100ms and multiplied that out for a monthly cost it's still about the same as an EC2 instance of the same capacity. (Eg. if I had a 1GB Lambda running for a total of 1 month compute time in the uswest2 region it'd cost $32). Oh and the cost of API gateway is $3.50 per million requests and the bandwidth cost is completely negligible for us (we redirect to the resized image hosted on S3, fronted by cloudfront). We get 3 million image resizing requests a day. That's over 30 per second. It would take a lot of VMs to handle that (image resizing isn't trivial). Or we could just pay the whole $11.50. I have to ask have you done the math? Lambda beats everything in cost except for some funky solutions using unreliable and less scalable lowendbox.com services.
- 010a 10y ago
  I would say that it strongly depends on the type of requests you are handling. Saying that you can run a 1GB lambda for 1 month nonstop for $32 does not impress me, and its kind of strange that it impresses you. You could run a t2.micro with the same RAM for $6/mo if you reserve it for a year. And if you want to give that t2.micro a workload where it only has to respond to 1 request at a time, the same terms we are affording the lambda system, then it's no comparison. Now, for responding to disparate requests every once in a while? Lambda is ideal. You can spin it up and you don't have to pay when it is isn't processing requests. But continuous requests? Hard no. We can argue that the cost overhead at full load is worth it for the ability to "infinitely" scale with no effort. Alright, that's fine. But let's not pretend that it is "cheaper".
  - nathancahill 10y ago
    I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but I'd like to point out that micro instances also have diminished networking (besides processing/memory). Depending on what you're doing, this could be a factor.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
morgante 10y ago
Yes, you're missing the fact that you don't have to run servers all the time. Unless your CPUs are constantly at 100% utilization, there is some slack in your infrastructure. Lambda you literally only pay for the compute time you actually use. I migrated a smallish app to Lambda from EC2 and shaved my AWS bill from >$100/m to <$5/m.

scrollaway 10y ago

What makes you say Lambda is more expensive than things like EC2? Obviously lambda is a hammer, not a swiss army knife - you shouldn't shoehorn it into your app just because it's the new tech on the block. But the use case isn't niche at all. We're using lambda for our service to ingest and process Hearthstone replays. An HTTP POST is sent to the API gateway, this triggers a lambda which parses a 0.5-2MB file, scrapes the data in it and stores data in the db + converts it to another format. The whole process takes 3-6 seconds. Lambda lets us easily scale to dozens of requests per second without having to worry about anything other than the DB server. Our frontend/app servers don't need to be touched. The alternative would be to provision and manage a lot of EC2 instances to handle the load. We'd have to worry about provisioning them dynamically so that it's economically viable. We'd have to manage the load balancing ourselves. Lambda's been a huge time saver. PS: Let it be known that Lambda only supports python 2.7, not python 3, and that really frickin sucks. Get your shit together, Amazon.

emjr 10y ago
"Let it be known that Lambda only supports python 2.7, not python 3, and that really frickin sucks. Get your shit together, Amazon." Node 4 support came, what, a month ago? It's pretty ridiculous.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  I specifically don't understand the Python 3 situation. They support Python 2, it can't be that complicated to have a separate Python 3 runtime.
- joobus 10y ago
  There is no significant benefit to python 3 over python 2.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Except that it is the way forward and many people choose to write python3 compatible code.
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    You're wrong, and it's irrelevant anyway. Our app is in Python 3. Having to support Python 2 just because lambda doesn't support 3.x is a pain.
  - nameless912 10y ago
    Unicode....? I mean, that's reason enough. Python 2's string processing suuuuuuucks.
  - timlyo 10y ago
    Asyncio? https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html
rckclmbr 10y ago
Do you leave your database server publicly open (but password protected obviously), or can you use IAM policies for this as well?
- scrollaway 10y ago
  A quick google search of more 3-letter-acronyms than there are in the US government yields this: - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/vpc-rds.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/vpc-rds.html - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/access-control-identity-based.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/access-control-...
SwellJoe 10y ago
I've got (virtual) servers all over the place. I run my tiny little "needs a minute" tasks on one or more of those. It's nice, I guess to make it a wholly isolated thing, but I rarely actually want to go to the trouble to design it to be isolated. My little jobs often need at least some of the rest of my production environment to be available (database, logs, libs, something). Making a Lambda thing just for those things seems like something I'd rarely want to go to extra effort for. But, if building on a very large scale with strict isolation requirements for your individual tasks it would make sense. Which is the niche I'm talking about; maybe it's just bigger than I assume it is.

d4mi3n 10y ago

AFAIK Lambda is the only way to react to events on S3 buckets. A lot of what I've seen it used for is as a mechanism for kicking off a workflow off of a new item in S3.

brianwawok 10y ago
SNS can be consumed from anywhere not just Lambda.
adzicg 10y ago
you can push S3 events to SQS and then consume it anywhere (eg we had file converters running on Heroku, listening to S3 events through SQS) Likewise, Lambda can execute events from SNS, Cloudwatch Events, Dynamo and a lot more, including the Amazon workflow system.

nostrademons 10y ago

I think the appeal of Lambda is that most services get zero-to-low usage, and so something which is "pay only for usage" may be a net win over dedicated computing resources if you use it for the right parts. I've had a number of startup ideas that went nowhere, and it would've been handy to test & demo them without springing for the full $17/month for an EC2 t2.micro instance. Usually they have some key aspect that's prevented me from running them on Lambda (eg. you can't exactly run a hacked Node.js binary on Lambda, and sending push notifications from it requires going through SNS and adopting its API), but if I could run arbitrary code & third-party packages and pay for only the computing time I use, it's an attractive proposition. In general you use AWS for convenience anyway - if you're concerned about minimizing costs, you can sometimes get 10x price/performance ratios by moving to dedicated hosting.

brianwawok 10y ago
Really $17 for a micro? Baby gce machine is $4.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Yup. AWS prices suck, in general. If it weren't for the large (multi-terabyte) dataset I need for my current project that they're hosting for free on aws-publicdatasets, I'd probably switch to Google Cloud. I may yet switch, which illustrates the danger of relying on proprietary APIs like Lambda.
- vacri 10y ago
  google micro (1 cpu, 0.6GB ram): $0.006/hr amazon nano (1 cpu, 0.5GB ram): $0.0065/hour https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ in both cases, +disk, +traffic Not exactly a crippling difference.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Except google gives you a discount just for using the instance. Amazon requires prepayment

AReallyGoodName 10y ago

I've found Lambda to be really ridiculously fucking cheap. We moved image resizing onto it and saved thousands a month. Don't compare the cost of Lambda per 100ms to the cost of a virtual machine per month since Lambda only charges as you use it. You'd have to have the CPU pegged at 100% usage to make that a fair comparison. Mind you even if you took the cost of Lambda per 100ms and multiplied that out for a monthly cost it's still about the same as an EC2 instance of the same capacity. (Eg. if I had a 1GB Lambda running for a total of 1 month compute time in the uswest2 region it'd cost $32). Oh and the cost of API gateway is $3.50 per million requests and the bandwidth cost is completely negligible for us (we redirect to the resized image hosted on S3, fronted by cloudfront). We get 3 million image resizing requests a day. That's over 30 per second. It would take a lot of VMs to handle that (image resizing isn't trivial). Or we could just pay the whole $11.50. I have to ask have you done the math? Lambda beats everything in cost except for some funky solutions using unreliable and less scalable lowendbox.com services.

010a 10y ago
I would say that it strongly depends on the type of requests you are handling. Saying that you can run a 1GB lambda for 1 month nonstop for $32 does not impress me, and its kind of strange that it impresses you. You could run a t2.micro with the same RAM for $6/mo if you reserve it for a year. And if you want to give that t2.micro a workload where it only has to respond to 1 request at a time, the same terms we are affording the lambda system, then it's no comparison. Now, for responding to disparate requests every once in a while? Lambda is ideal. You can spin it up and you don't have to pay when it is isn't processing requests. But continuous requests? Hard no. We can argue that the cost overhead at full load is worth it for the ability to "infinitely" scale with no effort. Alright, that's fine. But let's not pretend that it is "cheaper".
- nathancahill 10y ago
  I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but I'd like to point out that micro instances also have diminished networking (besides processing/memory). Depending on what you're doing, this could be a factor.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

morgante 10y ago

Yes, you're missing the fact that you don't have to run servers all the time. Unless your CPUs are constantly at 100% utilization, there is some slack in your infrastructure. Lambda you literally only pay for the compute time you actually use. I migrated a smallish app to Lambda from EC2 and shaved my AWS bill from >$100/m to <$5/m.