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This is awesome, saving that much money can be great for startups. Oddly I can’t see lambdas being enough of a cost to justify it to hobbyist such as myself.

by 41209 5y ago

This is awesome, saving that much money can be great for startups. Oddly I can’t see lambdas being enough of a cost to justify it to hobbyist such as myself. But this is a great sign of things to come, so much energy is consumed by data centers. Then again, I wonder how much code will randomly break, plus AWS’s dependency management is literally bundle it up locally and upload a zip. What happens if a ARM package can’t be built locally.

OJFord 5y ago
> AWS’s dependency management is literally bundle it up locally and upload a zip. That's true and not great IMO either, I also wish the zip wasn't necessary - in the 'bootstrap' binary case just let me upload the binary! - but in case you're not aware of layers (just guessing from 'dependencies') it can be improved a bit: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/configuration-layers.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/configuration-l... > What happens if a ARM package can’t be built locally. An Arm package can only not be built locally if you decline to use tools that'd allow you to do so?
- HatchedLake721 5y ago
  Zip is not necessary anymore https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-container-image-support/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-containe...
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Ah I'd forgotten about that, thanks! I haven't created any since then other than via Serverless, which.. a large part of my distaste for it is the opaqueness and not knowing what it's doing, but I assume it uses zip method.
- zxcvbn4038 5y ago
  I wish cloud formation allowed for more then 4096 bytes of inlined code. The underlying API allows for 50MB, sometimes it’s really nice to be able to deploy from cloudformation without all of the overhead for S3 or ECR.
acdha 5y ago
> Then again, I wonder how much code will randomly break, plus AWS’s dependency management is literally bundle it up locally and upload a zip. I much prefer using Docker containers since they added support for this. There's an established toolchain which supports things like this and it fits well into popular deployment pipelines from things like GitLab/Github.
- HatchedLake721 5y ago
  Any difference in cold start times between .zip and Docker container?
  - acdha 5y ago
    I haven’t done a microbenchmark to see. It hasn’t been notable in my usage.
sjansen 5y ago
As already mentioned, Docker images are also available and that's my preferred solution. If your concern is more about having access to ARM hardware, CodeBuild is a reasonable option. CodePipeline is more expensive than it should be given the feature set, but CodeBuild is cheap and easy to use directly. Alternatively, I've been intending to move some of my build to Lambda itself. Easy to bootstrap if you use an architecture independent language like Python to script your build. And if your code takes more than 15 minutes to build, should it really be a Lambda function?
- 41209 5y ago
  To be completely clear, if you just need a python script to basically Sync a few AWS services together, this is great. That’s how I use Lamdas now. My main concern if I’m using something like Numpy, and I pull my dependencies locally on my 64-bit Machine I have no idea what’s going to work once I push it up to AWS ARM.
rewma 5y ago
> This is awesome, saving that much money can be great for startups. This doesn't sound very realistic. Cost-conscious organizations would hardly consider lambdas as a reasonable option unless you're well within the free tier limits. Otherwise lambdas are far more expensive than simply handling requests directly with a service running on EC2/ECS/Fargate.
- mwarkentin 5y ago
  If you have really well tuned autoscaling or really consistent request workloads. My company is still provisioned for peak load at all times which is not cheap.. We have another product built on lambdas where the compute is cheaper than the monitoring, security tooling, etc attached to the account. For a lot of use cases, it is cheap.
- zxcvbn4038 5y ago
  Depends on your workload - it’s about $3.50 per month for the smallest T series VM on the SPOT market in the cheap regions (us-east-1, us-east-2, us-west-2), that is your next step up from lambda for minimal workloads. You can run a whole lot (many many millions) of lambda invocations before your bill gets anywhere close to 3.50. But after you exceed that point a dedicated instance running your workload full time starts to look nice. You could also run a Digital Ocean droplet for less which might make sense if your on tinkerer budget and don’t need IAM access control or VPC access.

by 41209 5y ago

OJFord 5y ago

> AWS’s dependency management is literally bundle it up locally and upload a zip. That's true and not great IMO either, I also wish the zip wasn't necessary - in the 'bootstrap' binary case just let me upload the binary! - but in case you're not aware of layers (just guessing from 'dependencies') it can be improved a bit: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/configuration-layers.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/configuration-l... > What happens if a ARM package can’t be built locally. An Arm package can only not be built locally if you decline to use tools that'd allow you to do so?

HatchedLake721 5y ago
Zip is not necessary anymore https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-container-image-support/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-containe...
- OJFord 5y ago
  Ah I'd forgotten about that, thanks! I haven't created any since then other than via Serverless, which.. a large part of my distaste for it is the opaqueness and not knowing what it's doing, but I assume it uses zip method.
zxcvbn4038 5y ago
I wish cloud formation allowed for more then 4096 bytes of inlined code. The underlying API allows for 50MB, sometimes it’s really nice to be able to deploy from cloudformation without all of the overhead for S3 or ECR.

acdha 5y ago

> Then again, I wonder how much code will randomly break, plus AWS’s dependency management is literally bundle it up locally and upload a zip. I much prefer using Docker containers since they added support for this. There's an established toolchain which supports things like this and it fits well into popular deployment pipelines from things like GitLab/Github.

HatchedLake721 5y ago
Any difference in cold start times between .zip and Docker container?
- acdha 5y ago
  I haven’t done a microbenchmark to see. It hasn’t been notable in my usage.

sjansen 5y ago

As already mentioned, Docker images are also available and that's my preferred solution. If your concern is more about having access to ARM hardware, CodeBuild is a reasonable option. CodePipeline is more expensive than it should be given the feature set, but CodeBuild is cheap and easy to use directly. Alternatively, I've been intending to move some of my build to Lambda itself. Easy to bootstrap if you use an architecture independent language like Python to script your build. And if your code takes more than 15 minutes to build, should it really be a Lambda function?

41209 5y ago
To be completely clear, if you just need a python script to basically Sync a few AWS services together, this is great. That’s how I use Lamdas now. My main concern if I’m using something like Numpy, and I pull my dependencies locally on my 64-bit Machine I have no idea what’s going to work once I push it up to AWS ARM.

rewma 5y ago

> This is awesome, saving that much money can be great for startups. This doesn't sound very realistic. Cost-conscious organizations would hardly consider lambdas as a reasonable option unless you're well within the free tier limits. Otherwise lambdas are far more expensive than simply handling requests directly with a service running on EC2/ECS/Fargate.

mwarkentin 5y ago
If you have really well tuned autoscaling or really consistent request workloads. My company is still provisioned for peak load at all times which is not cheap.. We have another product built on lambdas where the compute is cheaper than the monitoring, security tooling, etc attached to the account. For a lot of use cases, it is cheap.
zxcvbn4038 5y ago
Depends on your workload - it’s about $3.50 per month for the smallest T series VM on the SPOT market in the cheap regions (us-east-1, us-east-2, us-west-2), that is your next step up from lambda for minimal workloads. You can run a whole lot (many many millions) of lambda invocations before your bill gets anywhere close to 3.50. But after you exceed that point a dedicated instance running your workload full time starts to look nice. You could also run a Digital Ocean droplet for less which might make sense if your on tinkerer budget and don’t need IAM access control or VPC access.