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Lambda seems like a neat concept, but is it really worthwhile? Conceptually, an infinitely scalable backend for whatever thing I'm working on sounds great, but
by cweagans 10y ago
Lambda seems like a neat concept, but is it really worthwhile? Conceptually, an infinitely scalable backend for whatever thing I'm working on sounds great, but in practice, there are some downsides. For instance, your client requests hits the API Gateway, which then initiates another HTTP request to whatever Lambda is supposed to be called, at which point, a container is started to run your code. By this point, you've added some overhead to every single request, and it's completely impossible to get rid of it because that's how Lambda is designed. Am I off base here? Does it really work like that? If so, what's the performance hit that you've seen compared to running e.g. ExpressJS directly on a VM or bare metal?
- justinhj 10y agoThe idea is that containers are started to support the load of your application. If the load of your application is so low you have zero containers running most of the time you're not the target audience for this kind of service.
- bni 10y agoIf you have zero containers running most of the time, AWS Lambda is attractive because it costs $0 when there is no activity, unlike instances that costs all the time even when idling.
- cweagans 10y agoSure, but even if your traffic is bursty, this would be a problem, no? If one container is already running and you suddenly need ten containers, that delay is still present. Also, I'm not sure your assertion is accurate. Amazon's entire selling point around Lambda is that you don't pay for the time that your code isn't running, which implies that the service was built around not having code running sometimes. If my code was going to be running all the time anyway, why not just run an EC2 instance?