5 ms·

Thanks for sharing. This is a perfect example which proves lambda/serverless/cf worker are snake oils.

dclusin 6y ago
I think there's situations where Lambdas make sense in spite of their pricing. I applied for a job on the Warren campaign and their tech stack relied on AWS lambdas. I think that makes sense for them. It's a short-lived endeavor that isn't going to be around next year. Spending a bit more to not have to deal with the headache of maintaining your own infra makes sense in scenarios like that.
- 838hhh 6y ago
  You assume that they made a correct and rational decision but you have no evidence to back it up. Retract your claim that there are situations where Lambdas make sense until you can provide concrete examples. Thanks.
iforgotmyaka 6y ago
It's not. If under 10 million requests per month, serverless will be cheaper and safer Else if under 1 billion request per month, managed VPS will be cheaper If over hundred of billions of requests per month, anything else than on premise is probably an error. Then you have grey areas where you need to process. But for most small project, you cannot beat the lambda prices. Especially if you expect bursts.
- foepys 6y ago
  But if I expect bursts, Lambda could potentially cost me a few thousand dollars in a day while my own instance could handle it fine for like $50. Even paying $50/mo over a few years would pay off in that case.
  - mongo-db-hater 6y ago
    Exactly. developer time lot more expensive. most people want to look cool & do cool things so they drink these cool aids. it sounds lot cooler to say that " i made geolocation service using serverless/lamba" than "i made geolocation service using boring monolithic technology". where the former takes 150 hours to get it right and painful to add/manage features. where the later is very easy to maintain and very predictable priced.
- tslover 6y ago
  the issue with you calculation is that you are trying to save $40 a month by spending 100-500 person hours and screwing your code base.
wooly_bully 6y ago
There's TONS of use cases for Lambdas where the operational costs (both in terms of time/energy/expertise and to lesser extent monetary) of running something persistent are much higher. In my last gig, we ran plenty of services that would never need to scale and would likely never hit the point where Lambda became too expensive. Low-utilization services (Example for order submit, because we only ever got a couple hundred orders per day), Cron-type jobs (Admins could use Cloudwatch to monitor), Temporary fan-outs using queues. Anything that won't ever hit the millions-per-day level is a good candidate for something along these lines. Most of those services cost <$5/month.
vangelis 6y ago
There's a cost curve lambda excels at. For services handling under 100 requests a second it's cheaper than a cheap EC2 instances.
- mongo-db-hater 6y ago
  choosing EC2 was probably mistake, may be linode would have been better choice here.
freehunter 6y ago
If that’s your opinion I’d like to hear your rebuttal to this [1]. It’s hard to argue against actual numbers for an actual production app running at actual scale. [1] https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-things-for-small-dollars-with-cloudflare-workers-and-azure-functions/ https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-thi...
- mongo-db-hater 6y ago
  if you are spending 279 using complicated cloudflare worker/azure function setup, you could have gotten away with $100 month if you have choosen linode/droplets. 32 million requests can be easily served with $50/month heroku node.
  - freehunter 6y ago
    I think you massively mis-read the article. $279/mo is what he would have spent. What he actually spends is under $1/mo. Sure a $50/mo Heroku box would do the trick but why spend $49/mo MORE when serverless is cheaper? What I want to hear is how you argue serverless is “snake oil” when evidence says it’s massively cheaper even at scale. Less than $1/mo to serve 141m requests. How is that snake oil when even you say an equivalent “serverfull” solution costs 50x more?
    - mongo-db-hater 6y ago
      Well, not exactly 1. You are saving $49 month by spending 250+ hours engineering hours to structure the application which is near impossible to extend/maintain. 2. The $49/month subsidy (free tier) you are getting is temporary and will eventually go away (think about google maps api price change). 3. 50x cost for serverfull solution is not a right number. lets say you have to handle 500M requests per month (around 200 QPS) the 50x becomes .000X. 4. If there is any sudden spike to popularity, you are screwed. you will end up paying several thousand $ per month.
      - freehunter 6y ago

I think there's situations where Lambdas make sense in spite of their pricing. I applied for a job on the Warren campaign and their tech stack relied on AWS lambdas. I think that makes sense for them. It's a short-lived endeavor that isn't going to be around next year. Spending a bit more to not have to deal with the headache of maintaining your own infra makes sense in scenarios like that.

838hhh 6y ago
You assume that they made a correct and rational decision but you have no evidence to back it up. Retract your claim that there are situations where Lambdas make sense until you can provide concrete examples. Thanks.

iforgotmyaka 6y ago

It's not. If under 10 million requests per month, serverless will be cheaper and safer Else if under 1 billion request per month, managed VPS will be cheaper If over hundred of billions of requests per month, anything else than on premise is probably an error. Then you have grey areas where you need to process. But for most small project, you cannot beat the lambda prices. Especially if you expect bursts.

foepys 6y ago
But if I expect bursts, Lambda could potentially cost me a few thousand dollars in a day while my own instance could handle it fine for like $50. Even paying $50/mo over a few years would pay off in that case.
- mongo-db-hater 6y ago
  Exactly. developer time lot more expensive. most people want to look cool & do cool things so they drink these cool aids. it sounds lot cooler to say that " i made geolocation service using serverless/lamba" than "i made geolocation service using boring monolithic technology". where the former takes 150 hours to get it right and painful to add/manage features. where the later is very easy to maintain and very predictable priced.
tslover 6y ago
the issue with you calculation is that you are trying to save $40 a month by spending 100-500 person hours and screwing your code base.

wooly_bully 6y ago

There's TONS of use cases for Lambdas where the operational costs (both in terms of time/energy/expertise and to lesser extent monetary) of running something persistent are much higher. In my last gig, we ran plenty of services that would never need to scale and would likely never hit the point where Lambda became too expensive. Low-utilization services (Example for order submit, because we only ever got a couple hundred orders per day), Cron-type jobs (Admins could use Cloudwatch to monitor), Temporary fan-outs using queues. Anything that won't ever hit the millions-per-day level is a good candidate for something along these lines. Most of those services cost <$5/month.

vangelis 6y ago

There's a cost curve lambda excels at. For services handling under 100 requests a second it's cheaper than a cheap EC2 instances.

mongo-db-hater 6y ago
choosing EC2 was probably mistake, may be linode would have been better choice here.

freehunter 6y ago

If that’s your opinion I’d like to hear your rebuttal to this [1]. It’s hard to argue against actual numbers for an actual production app running at actual scale. [1] https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-things-for-small-dollars-with-cloudflare-workers-and-azure-functions/ https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-thi...

mongo-db-hater 6y ago
if you are spending 279 using complicated cloudflare worker/azure function setup, you could have gotten away with $100 month if you have choosen linode/droplets. 32 million requests can be easily served with $50/month heroku node.
- freehunter 6y ago
  I think you massively mis-read the article. $279/mo is what he would have spent. What he actually spends is under $1/mo. Sure a $50/mo Heroku box would do the trick but why spend $49/mo MORE when serverless is cheaper? What I want to hear is how you argue serverless is “snake oil” when evidence says it’s massively cheaper even at scale. Less than $1/mo to serve 141m requests. How is that snake oil when even you say an equivalent “serverfull” solution costs 50x more?
  - mongo-db-hater 6y ago
    Well, not exactly 1. You are saving $49 month by spending 250+ hours engineering hours to structure the application which is near impossible to extend/maintain. 2. The $49/month subsidy (free tier) you are getting is temporary and will eventually go away (think about google maps api price change). 3. 50x cost for serverfull solution is not a right number. lets say you have to handle 500M requests per month (around 200 QPS) the 50x becomes .000X. 4. If there is any sudden spike to popularity, you are screwed. you will end up paying several thousand $ per month.
    - freehunter 6y ago