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Yes, you are right. That's almost it. There are even some open source function-as-a-service platforms out there that do this. The advantage with lambda is that

Yes, you are right. That's almost it. There are even some open source function-as-a-service platforms out there that do this. The advantage with lambda is that it is dealt with by Amazon so it is virtually infinitely scalable. Also, it integrates with tightly with a ton of AWS services which makes it a great option if you are already invested in AWS.

oelmekki 9y ago
I see, thanks for confirming this. I was initially skeptic about lambda when it was first released, thinking "so after heroku which makes us pay per process, now we must pay per function call?", but I know better than trusting my doubts about a new tech, I've seen too many people focusing on the parts from a new tech resembling an old one, totally missing what is new. Would you agree with this statement? => what sets lambda apart is that it boots so fast that it's legit to start one only to call one function, which in turns, thanks to aws infrastructure, allows to massively parallelize short lived tasks.
- owaislone 9y ago
  Yes, I'd agree with that but to me Lambda is much more than that. It's not only suitable for very short running tasks. In fact it is suitable for everything other than very long running tasks. We can build proper APIs and web services on top of lambda and literally only pay for the exact resources we consume. We never have to worry about managing infrastructure, handling auto-scaling, etc. AWS recently also introduced a "serverless" database offering that also comes up when you need it and then goes to sleep. It can scale "infinitely" as well. I see majority of my workloads implemented on top of Lambda + ECS/Fargate/Kubernestes in near future. Lambda for all short running jobs (1-5mins) like image processing, emails, notifications, web services, APIs, glue code, state machines, etc and ECS for long running tasks like data processing, DB syncs, backups, video encoding etc etc.

oelmekki 9y ago

I see, thanks for confirming this. I was initially skeptic about lambda when it was first released, thinking "so after heroku which makes us pay per process, now we must pay per function call?", but I know better than trusting my doubts about a new tech, I've seen too many people focusing on the parts from a new tech resembling an old one, totally missing what is new. Would you agree with this statement? => what sets lambda apart is that it boots so fast that it's legit to start one only to call one function, which in turns, thanks to aws infrastructure, allows to massively parallelize short lived tasks.

owaislone 9y ago
Yes, I'd agree with that but to me Lambda is much more than that. It's not only suitable for very short running tasks. In fact it is suitable for everything other than very long running tasks. We can build proper APIs and web services on top of lambda and literally only pay for the exact resources we consume. We never have to worry about managing infrastructure, handling auto-scaling, etc. AWS recently also introduced a "serverless" database offering that also comes up when you need it and then goes to sleep. It can scale "infinitely" as well. I see majority of my workloads implemented on top of Lambda + ECS/Fargate/Kubernestes in near future. Lambda for all short running jobs (1-5mins) like image processing, emails, notifications, web services, APIs, glue code, state machines, etc and ECS for long running tasks like data processing, DB syncs, backups, video encoding etc etc.