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We have a similar application (parallelized C++ code operating on large files, for bioinformatics even) and ended up down the reverse path: started on Lambda, m
by zbjornson 9y ago
We have a similar application (parallelized C++ code operating on large files, for bioinformatics even) and ended up down the reverse path: started on Lambda, moved to our own RPC system. Lambda got super expensive (in part because there was no way to reuse a worker while it was doing async work like an S3 download), couldn't parallelize nearly enough without hitting AWS hard-limit quotas, had significantly lower CPU perf and didn't provide a way to cache files (like a genome in this case). Spot/preemptible instances keep our costs down while letting us keep a few hundred servers up at a time.
- cobookman 9y agoI feel like serverless is only benefitial for low volume / low traffic workloads. The only other perk I've found is that the serverless billing model makes it easier to estimate costs.
- reconbot 9y agoI found it lowered our server cost incredibly for a high volume read heavy site. It allowed us to scale in response to increased traffic (not instantly that's a lie, spikes in the thousands of requests a second are not handled well, but over a few minutes it catches up without issue) and not have to provision and spin up servers. We were constantly over provisioned before and now it's a much lower but moving margin.
- cobookman 9y agoYou can do that today though with K8s and auto-scaling. Not sure how well autoscaling works on AWS, but on GCP its a breeze.
- friendly_chap 9y agoWell, yes. This is why we are building a solution that you can install anywhere https://github.com/1backend/1backend https://github.com/1backend/1backend You might jokingly say we are reintroducing the servers into the serverless concept :D But I think we are just giving freedom back to the users.