4 ms·

Assuming the author's tests are single-thread, I'm pretty sure 1024 MB doesn't give you a full CPU core on Lambda. I could be wrong though; I haven't payed atte

• NathanKP 8y ago
  It's not quite that straightforward. Lambda is more expensive per cycle if you are capable of keeping an instance fully utilized and getting every cycle out of that machine. After all if your Node.js or Go code takes say 20ms per request and can handle many concurrent requests you can squeeze a LOT of requests per second from a single instance. But many workloads don't have that high of a request volume and can't actually make full use of an instance. If you have a small API or service that gets one or two requests every few seconds then paying for a 100ms chunk of Lambda execution time every couple seconds is going to be much cheaper than reserving an entire instance and then not being able to get good utilization out of it. The tipping point is whether or not you have enough workload volume to keep an instance busy at all times. So for example password hashing in the article above. Because password hashing is deliberately CPU intensive it is very easy to keep an EC2 instance busy with even a low request volume. For a good hashing algorithm with lots of rounds its not uncommon to only get 10 authentications per second per core, because the algorithm is deliberately designed to be CPU heavy. So if you process more than 10 auths/sec then its probably cheaper to put the workload in a container that runs on an instance because you can keep that instance busy. But if the same service is only handling one or two password hashes every minute, then you can save money by only paying for 100ms increments when an auth request arrives, and stop paying when there is nothing to do.
  • sfeng 8y ago
    How does that compare to the cost of cloudflare workers?
    • NathanKP 8y ago
      No idea. Given that a secure password hash will probably take about 100ms-200ms of execution time to calculate that would fall under Cloudflares "custom pricing" tier that you need to call them and negotiate. The baseline Cloudflare worker tiers are limited to less than 5ms, less than 10ms, and less than 50ms, which isn't going to be enough time to calculate a 12 round bcrypt for example.
      • zackbloom 8y ago
        I have a Worker running bcrypt here: https://cloudflareworkers.com/#4addaef33b10b6a58954ffbb310e7cdf:https://tutorial.cloudflareworkers.com https://cloudflareworkers.com/#4addaef33b10b6a58954ffbb310e7... Based on this code: https://gist.github.com/zackbloom/c0064838cbf85e7b81df9d46900775bb https://gist.github.com/zackbloom/c0064838cbf85e7b81df9d4690... That means it would cost you $0.50 / million requests. AWS Lambda would be $1.84 / million, $3.50 / million for API Gateway, $0.40 / million for AWS Route 53, and various other charges.
        • NathanKP 8y ago
          Technically CloudFlare workers is better compared with Lambda @ Edge no? I don't think you'd be using API Gateway, instead CloudFront right?
          • zackbloom 8y ago
            Originally we were thinking about it in those terms (as an alternative to Lambda@Edge), but based on our recent results I am happy to have people compare it to Lambda as well. Lambda with API Gateway is at least eight times more expensive than Workers, and only runs your code in one location instead of 151. Unless you're using Lambda to do something ultra-Amazon-specific (like process S3 changes), I don't see why it would be the better choice.
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• hobls 8y ago
  Anyone using Lambda should _absolutely_ do load testing with different memory configurations. You will get different results, and should analyze what is best for your application. When calculating the overall cost of managing your own instances you should also include time spent by your engineering team. There are particular tipping points in terms of overall requests per second at which point you'd save money by moving from Lambda to something like Fargate, and then even farther above that, you're better off using EC2. And then even above that, you should be running your own instances in a colo space. (And then at some point you should probably be building your own datacenters, and then at some point you should start colonizing the moon, and then... you get the idea.)
  • philipodonnell 8y ago
    Are there any tools that allow you to load test Lambda services with different memory configurations?
    • hobls 8y ago
      Not to my knowledge. I'd just do something simple by changing your CloudFormation (or Terraform or whatever) templates, deploying the new config, and then running another load test. Could also just spin multiple different versions of the Lambda up, but at some point you need to start getting creative to actually generate enough traffic and running multiple load tests at the same time becomes a pain. When it comes to load testing tools I like Vegeta[1], personally. (Though I've also used some much more complicated proprietary tools when testing at great scale.) 1: https://github.com/tsenart/vegeta https://github.com/tsenart/vegeta
    • reilly3000 8y ago
      In Serverless Framework you can specify memory per function so it stands to reason making multiple copies at different memory levels would be pretty easy to test, even concurrently.
      • hobls 8y ago
        The real fun starts when you need to start spinning up a distributed load testing fleet to actually generate enough load. :P