3 ms·

Seriously. Something like an AWS nano instance only costs $4/month and can easily handle that many requests an hour with a slow dynamic language.

highfrequency 7y ago
Is there no variable charge for network bandwidth?
- kenhwang 7y ago
  Lambda and EC2 have the same network bandwidth charge.
jerf 7y ago
The scary thing I saw is that while it's cool that Lambda is $2/month right now, which is negligible, it's $2/month for 900 users. If it scales linearly (and I don't know that it does, because I don't know exactly how the system works), then that means you're one good blog post somewhere about your extension away from being $200-$2000/month. That said, my gut says there's a good chance that since the author is surprised at the rate of requests, there's almost certainly an optimization opportunity that wouldn't even take much effort.
- tasogare 7y ago
  Especially the author has experience with docker so deploying a container for his app on Digital Ocean would be super quick and easy. In addition, the list of disadvantages seems longer than the advantages, with scary points like the difficulty to debug things (that could easily takes hours to figure out if something don’t run properly).
habosa 7y ago
However in the case when they both get 0 requests, the Lambda solution costs $0 and the Micro instance still costs $4. That's a really nice advantage for starting a new project where you're confident in unit economics but have unknown scale.
- cnst 7y ago
  Is it two different arguments you're posting? How's $0 on zero requests is a better solution when the range would be 0 to $2000 for what's a fixed $4 without Lambda? The $0 argument is also flowed because $4 is a fixed cost for unlimited $0 to $2000 solutions through hedging. If you have 10 solutions, what's the likelihood of all of them still doing $0, or at the very least below $4? The unit economics argument is likewise hard to see in practice, because we'd be talking quite different numbers on a per-unit cost with Lambda vs. without, which may easily make the difference between making a profit or taking a loss, especially if it's a lifestyle business we're talking about.
- abc-xyz 7y ago
  Pretty sure you'd have to pay at least $3.5 if you wanted to expose your Lambda function using AWS API Gateway (which I assume most would want to do).. The author mention $1.11 but that's for "HTTP APIs (Preview)" rather than "REST APIs" - in either case it wouldn't be 0. At least that's how I read it.. AWS pricing is such a mess with so many hidden fees (https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/pricing/)..

highfrequency 7y ago

Is there no variable charge for network bandwidth?

kenhwang 7y ago
Lambda and EC2 have the same network bandwidth charge.

jerf 7y ago

The scary thing I saw is that while it's cool that Lambda is $2/month right now, which is negligible, it's $2/month for 900 users. If it scales linearly (and I don't know that it does, because I don't know exactly how the system works), then that means you're one good blog post somewhere about your extension away from being $200-$2000/month. That said, my gut says there's a good chance that since the author is surprised at the rate of requests, there's almost certainly an optimization opportunity that wouldn't even take much effort.

tasogare 7y ago
Especially the author has experience with docker so deploying a container for his app on Digital Ocean would be super quick and easy. In addition, the list of disadvantages seems longer than the advantages, with scary points like the difficulty to debug things (that could easily takes hours to figure out if something don’t run properly).

habosa 7y ago

However in the case when they both get 0 requests, the Lambda solution costs $0 and the Micro instance still costs $4. That's a really nice advantage for starting a new project where you're confident in unit economics but have unknown scale.

cnst 7y ago
Is it two different arguments you're posting? How's $0 on zero requests is a better solution when the range would be 0 to $2000 for what's a fixed $4 without Lambda? The $0 argument is also flowed because $4 is a fixed cost for unlimited $0 to $2000 solutions through hedging. If you have 10 solutions, what's the likelihood of all of them still doing $0, or at the very least below $4? The unit economics argument is likewise hard to see in practice, because we'd be talking quite different numbers on a per-unit cost with Lambda vs. without, which may easily make the difference between making a profit or taking a loss, especially if it's a lifestyle business we're talking about.
abc-xyz 7y ago
Pretty sure you'd have to pay at least $3.5 if you wanted to expose your Lambda function using AWS API Gateway (which I assume most would want to do).. The author mention $1.11 but that's for "HTTP APIs (Preview)" rather than "REST APIs" - in either case it wouldn't be 0. At least that's how I read it.. AWS pricing is such a mess with so many hidden fees (https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/pricing/)..