9 ms·

> ...we really want you to be able to pay for what you use. Cloudflare Workers has the right pricing model. They only charge for CPU time and not wall time. Th

> ...we really want you to be able to pay for what you use. Cloudflare Workers has the right pricing model. They only charge for CPU time and not wall time. They also do not charge for bandwidth. > Lots of sub 100ms workloads... AWS Lambda (or Lambda at Edge), as it stands, is 10x more expensive for sub 50ms workloads (Workers does allow upto 100ms for the 99.9th percentile) that can fit 128MB RAM. https://medium.com/@zackbloom/serverless-pricing-and-costs-aws-lambda-and-lambda-edge-169bfb58db75 https://medium.com/@zackbloom/serverless-pricing-and-costs-a...

munns 6y ago
Except that none of the rest of your infrastructure is there, and that APIs represent just a non-majority part of Lambda workloads.
- mrits 6y ago
  To be clear, you're acknowledging Cloudflare has a much better pricing model but just not as many other services yet?
  - munns 6y ago
    No to be clear I'm saying you are comparing things that are way more different than our friends at Cloudflare would like you to think. They aren't brought up in any of the convos I have with customers.
    - ignoramous 6y ago
      But you're telling us that Lambda's prices are justifiably higher because of the strong vendor lock-in? AWS is starting to sound more like Oracle. Ironic. :) Besides the fact that Cloudflare's part of the Bandwidth Alliance with GCP and other infrastructure providers from which AWS is conspicuously absent, Cloudflare's also slowly but surely building a portfolio of cloud services.
      - bt1a 6y ago
        Woof :)
      - jrd259 6y ago
        This reply is in bad faith. He did not attempt to "justify" the pricing with "vendor lock-in". Indeed, the prices went down, not up.
        ignoramous 6y ago
        Lambda's pricing is indeed higher than Cloudflare Workers for sub 50ms workloads (that fit 128MB RAM). Cloudflare's alliance with other infrastructure providers mean Cloudflare's platform isn't really limited to "API" workloads. This is discounting the fact that Cloudflare recently announced Workers Unlimited for workloads that need to run longer (upto 30mins) though then they do charge for bandwidth.
        alisonkisk 6y ago
        The question here isn't the price change here (which is in some sense mainly about balancing short functions and long functions, removing the penalty for short functions) , it's where the pricing is at overall vs Cloudflare.
    - gwerbret 6y ago
      > No to be clear I'm saying you are comparing things that are way more different than our friends at Cloudflare would like you to think. Care to expand on that? What exactly do you mean by "things are way more different"?
      - acer4666 6y ago
        This is pretty standard AWS marketing spiel. They make vague assertions of "ah but you're not considering the big picture...." with no details
        sushshshsh 6y ago
        Based. "That's just an edge case. Our customers love this service!" It's like going to a restaurant that uses bottled water instead of tap water, and they dont provide an answer as to what the benefits of bottled water are
        staticassertion 6y ago
        If you want to compare two things that are different in a ton of ways, don't be mad when someone points it out.
        ignoramous 6y ago
        It isn't about the products, it is about the pricing model in a similar market. Second, for sub 50ms workloads [0], Workers is absolutely a superior solution to API Gateway + Lambda or Cloudfront + Lambda at Edge if the workloads can fit 128MB RAM and package/compile to 1MB JavaScript or WASM executables, in terms of cost, speed, latency, ease of development etc [0] For Workers, 50ms is all CPU time and that is definitely not the case with Lambda which may even charge you for the time it takes to setup the runtime to run the code and time spent doing Network IO and bandwith and RAM and vCPUs and what not.
      - ctvo 6y ago
        Last I looked Cloudflare Workers had different limits and constraints: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits It's a quick Google. 128MB max memory, 6 concurrent out going connections max, 1MB code size limit. The use case here is a subset of what AWS Lambda can handle. The supported languages also differ (only things that have a JS / wasm conversion for Cloudflare Workers). I haven't looked deeply, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand there's also restrictions on the built-in APIs available [1] and npm packages supported for NodeJS. I would assume some of the above contributes to the price difference. 1 - https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/web-standards https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/web-s...
    - alisonkisk 6y ago
      This comment would be much more useful if you gave some clear examples of the difference (presumably something you get on Lambda that makes it worth more per ms than Cloudflare). Otherwise it's just "AWS said, Cloudflare said"
  - CapriciousCptl 6y ago
    They're not easily comparable (I tried using Cloudflare Workers before going back to AWS). Lambda@Edge runs Node or Python. Cloudflare Workers runs V8 with "worker isolates" which has a few more caveats, an imperfect but improving dev experience, and doesn't work with a lot of npm packages.
    - eins1234 6y ago
      What would be really useful for my use case (running browser tests on a schedule) is if Cloudflare workers actually supported running full headless chromium automation in addition to just V8 isolates. Right now I'm using puppeteer/playwright + Lambda, but would love to have more options.
      - Normal_gaussian 6y ago
        Headless browser tests seem to be quite far away from the problems cloudflare workers are trying to solve. https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits Workers aren't the same as lambdas, they are a super slim JS environments. At 50ms max runtime most browsers won't even start, let alone fetch and process a page.
      - ignoramous 6y ago
        CloudWatch Synthetics may fit your usecase? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/CloudWatch_Synthetics_Canaries.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori... Then there are more specialized browser-testing providers like LambdaTest.com and BrowserStack.com
        chrisweekly 6y ago
        and the venerable WPT (private instances, not the free public one at webpagetest.org)
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 6y ago
- alex_reg 6y ago
  It's nice to get a semi-official confirmation of AWS pricing strategy: create lock in, then overcharge.
- ukd1 6y ago
  Yet, if you're a Cloudflare user, all of your edges are there - so it doesn't matter. We use Workers extensively for "edge" related things. Lambda, never - but for working with S3 buckets, sure. They feel similar, but differently specialized.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    Lambdas are UDFs for S3.
tejohnso 6y ago
> They also do not charge for bandwidth. Is there fine print on this? Can I put 100TB / mo through their caching servers at the lowest $20 price tier?
- anonymoushn 6y ago
  Yes, but you'll probably get an email about it.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Not if you're actually taking up that much cache storage but bandwidth has plenty of examples of high usage on low tiers. They usually allow it as long as you're not affecting the rest of the network adversely since the lines are already paid for (which is the right approach IMO).
- ignoramous 6y ago
  Very high bandwidth usage for Cloudflare Workers workloads is not against ToS according to Cloudflare's CEO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857
astral303 6y ago
That's because keeping track of request state is not free. Ask an edge router. If you have a request open, even though it's not doing CPU, that request has to be in a queue somewhere, tracked for a response that can be transmitted back. I don't know the infra costs of operating lambda, but my guess is that it's far from CPU-dominated. I would not be surprised if the Cloudflare pricing model is making a tradeoff to make CPU-bound workloads pay for more of the infra than the rest. It's a valid trade-off to make as a business offering, and it might be feasible given the mixture of workloads. Whether it's the right way is debatable. Whether this model can be tanked by an army of actors taking advantage of CPU-insensitive pricing remains to be seen, or is an acceptable risk that you can take (which you can observe and protect against).
StreamBright 6y ago
>> AWS Lambda (or Lambda at Edge), as it stands, is 10x more expensive for sub 50ms workloads Not sure about this, most use cases of Lambda use other resources and do not exist in a vacuum. Comparison should be made using complete systems not only parts.

munns 6y ago

Except that none of the rest of your infrastructure is there, and that APIs represent just a non-majority part of Lambda workloads.

mrits 6y ago
To be clear, you're acknowledging Cloudflare has a much better pricing model but just not as many other services yet?
- munns 6y ago
  No to be clear I'm saying you are comparing things that are way more different than our friends at Cloudflare would like you to think. They aren't brought up in any of the convos I have with customers.
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    But you're telling us that Lambda's prices are justifiably higher because of the strong vendor lock-in? AWS is starting to sound more like Oracle. Ironic. :) Besides the fact that Cloudflare's part of the Bandwidth Alliance with GCP and other infrastructure providers from which AWS is conspicuously absent, Cloudflare's also slowly but surely building a portfolio of cloud services.
    - bt1a 6y ago
      Woof :)
    - jrd259 6y ago
      This reply is in bad faith. He did not attempt to "justify" the pricing with "vendor lock-in". Indeed, the prices went down, not up.
      - ignoramous 6y ago
        Lambda's pricing is indeed higher than Cloudflare Workers for sub 50ms workloads (that fit 128MB RAM). Cloudflare's alliance with other infrastructure providers mean Cloudflare's platform isn't really limited to "API" workloads. This is discounting the fact that Cloudflare recently announced Workers Unlimited for workloads that need to run longer (upto 30mins) though then they do charge for bandwidth.
      - alisonkisk 6y ago
        The question here isn't the price change here (which is in some sense mainly about balancing short functions and long functions, removing the penalty for short functions) , it's where the pricing is at overall vs Cloudflare.
  - gwerbret 6y ago
    > No to be clear I'm saying you are comparing things that are way more different than our friends at Cloudflare would like you to think. Care to expand on that? What exactly do you mean by "things are way more different"?
    - acer4666 6y ago
      This is pretty standard AWS marketing spiel. They make vague assertions of "ah but you're not considering the big picture...." with no details
      - sushshshsh 6y ago
        Based. "That's just an edge case. Our customers love this service!" It's like going to a restaurant that uses bottled water instead of tap water, and they dont provide an answer as to what the benefits of bottled water are
      - staticassertion 6y ago
        If you want to compare two things that are different in a ton of ways, don't be mad when someone points it out.
        ignoramous 6y ago
        It isn't about the products, it is about the pricing model in a similar market. Second, for sub 50ms workloads [0], Workers is absolutely a superior solution to API Gateway + Lambda or Cloudfront + Lambda at Edge if the workloads can fit 128MB RAM and package/compile to 1MB JavaScript or WASM executables, in terms of cost, speed, latency, ease of development etc [0] For Workers, 50ms is all CPU time and that is definitely not the case with Lambda which may even charge you for the time it takes to setup the runtime to run the code and time spent doing Network IO and bandwith and RAM and vCPUs and what not.
    - ctvo 6y ago
      Last I looked Cloudflare Workers had different limits and constraints: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits It's a quick Google. 128MB max memory, 6 concurrent out going connections max, 1MB code size limit. The use case here is a subset of what AWS Lambda can handle. The supported languages also differ (only things that have a JS / wasm conversion for Cloudflare Workers). I haven't looked deeply, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand there's also restrictions on the built-in APIs available [1] and npm packages supported for NodeJS. I would assume some of the above contributes to the price difference. 1 - https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/web-standards https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/web-s...
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    This comment would be much more useful if you gave some clear examples of the difference (presumably something you get on Lambda that makes it worth more per ms than Cloudflare). Otherwise it's just "AWS said, Cloudflare said"
- CapriciousCptl 6y ago
  They're not easily comparable (I tried using Cloudflare Workers before going back to AWS). Lambda@Edge runs Node or Python. Cloudflare Workers runs V8 with "worker isolates" which has a few more caveats, an imperfect but improving dev experience, and doesn't work with a lot of npm packages.
  - eins1234 6y ago
    What would be really useful for my use case (running browser tests on a schedule) is if Cloudflare workers actually supported running full headless chromium automation in addition to just V8 isolates. Right now I'm using puppeteer/playwright + Lambda, but would love to have more options.
    - Normal_gaussian 6y ago
      Headless browser tests seem to be quite far away from the problems cloudflare workers are trying to solve. https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits Workers aren't the same as lambdas, they are a super slim JS environments. At 50ms max runtime most browsers won't even start, let alone fetch and process a page.
    - ignoramous 6y ago
      CloudWatch Synthetics may fit your usecase? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/CloudWatch_Synthetics_Canaries.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori... Then there are more specialized browser-testing providers like LambdaTest.com and BrowserStack.com
      - chrisweekly 6y ago
        and the venerable WPT (private instances, not the free public one at webpagetest.org)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 6y ago
alex_reg 6y ago
It's nice to get a semi-official confirmation of AWS pricing strategy: create lock in, then overcharge.
ukd1 6y ago
Yet, if you're a Cloudflare user, all of your edges are there - so it doesn't matter. We use Workers extensively for "edge" related things. Lambda, never - but for working with S3 buckets, sure. They feel similar, but differently specialized.
- sitkack 6y ago
  Lambdas are UDFs for S3.

tejohnso 6y ago

> They also do not charge for bandwidth. Is there fine print on this? Can I put 100TB / mo through their caching servers at the lowest $20 price tier?

anonymoushn 6y ago
Yes, but you'll probably get an email about it.
manigandham 6y ago
Not if you're actually taking up that much cache storage but bandwidth has plenty of examples of high usage on low tiers. They usually allow it as long as you're not affecting the rest of the network adversely since the lines are already paid for (which is the right approach IMO).
ignoramous 6y ago
Very high bandwidth usage for Cloudflare Workers workloads is not against ToS according to Cloudflare's CEO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857

astral303 6y ago

That's because keeping track of request state is not free. Ask an edge router. If you have a request open, even though it's not doing CPU, that request has to be in a queue somewhere, tracked for a response that can be transmitted back. I don't know the infra costs of operating lambda, but my guess is that it's far from CPU-dominated. I would not be surprised if the Cloudflare pricing model is making a tradeoff to make CPU-bound workloads pay for more of the infra than the rest. It's a valid trade-off to make as a business offering, and it might be feasible given the mixture of workloads. Whether it's the right way is debatable. Whether this model can be tanked by an army of actors taking advantage of CPU-insensitive pricing remains to be seen, or is an acceptable risk that you can take (which you can observe and protect against).

StreamBright 6y ago

>> AWS Lambda (or Lambda at Edge), as it stands, is 10x more expensive for sub 50ms workloads Not sure about this, most use cases of Lambda use other resources and do not exist in a vacuum. Comparison should be made using complete systems not only parts.