3 ms·

In my experience, if you can't say "get over it" to your customers when they complain about performance then Lambda is not the right tool. Just use EC2.

wongarsu 5y ago
It's an excellent product for glue code between the various AWS services. Just about every AWS product can trigger Lambda functions, so if you want to run image recognition whenever a new image is uploaded to S3, Lambda is the way to do that. They also make great cron jobs. But for some reason Amazon likes to sell it as a way to run any web application backend, as if that was a good use case.
- sudhirj 5y ago
  It can be. We run dynamic image resizing (have a couple million image high quality originals in S3, and customers request sizes based on their screen). Each request is handled by a lambda, and even though these are memory intensive operations we never need to worry about servers or running out or RAM or circuit breakers or anything. Whatever the load it just works. The actual operations take on the order of 100ms, so the cold start is negligible to us. And the end product is cached on a CDN anyway. Costs less than one m5.large, but at peak loads it does work 100 times what's possible on the m5.large. Say you open a page with a 100 images on it for example. With lambda the all images are resized for you in parallel, so total 100ms. If this was servers, would have to run 100 servers to give you the same performance. A single servers could resize images in sequence all day and might be cheaper than running a lambda repeatedly all day, but that's not the requirement. The requirement is to suddenly do 100 things in parallel within 100ms just once when you open the app.
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
    > Say you open a page with a 100 images on it for example. With lambda the all images are resized for you in parallel, so total 100ms. If this was servers, would have to run 100 servers to give you the same performance You're probably just simplifying, but to clarify servers can totally do multiple things at once. That's how Amazon runs multiple lambdas on one physical server.
    - sudhirj 5y ago
      They can, and these are already multi core operations. If takes 4 cores 100ms to do this operation, so on a server with 4 cores doing a 100 of them takes 10 seconds, while on lambda it takes only 0.1 seconds to to them all in parallel.

wongarsu 5y ago

It's an excellent product for glue code between the various AWS services. Just about every AWS product can trigger Lambda functions, so if you want to run image recognition whenever a new image is uploaded to S3, Lambda is the way to do that. They also make great cron jobs. But for some reason Amazon likes to sell it as a way to run any web application backend, as if that was a good use case.

sudhirj 5y ago
It can be. We run dynamic image resizing (have a couple million image high quality originals in S3, and customers request sizes based on their screen). Each request is handled by a lambda, and even though these are memory intensive operations we never need to worry about servers or running out or RAM or circuit breakers or anything. Whatever the load it just works. The actual operations take on the order of 100ms, so the cold start is negligible to us. And the end product is cached on a CDN anyway. Costs less than one m5.large, but at peak loads it does work 100 times what's possible on the m5.large. Say you open a page with a 100 images on it for example. With lambda the all images are resized for you in parallel, so total 100ms. If this was servers, would have to run 100 servers to give you the same performance. A single servers could resize images in sequence all day and might be cheaper than running a lambda repeatedly all day, but that's not the requirement. The requirement is to suddenly do 100 things in parallel within 100ms just once when you open the app.
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  > Say you open a page with a 100 images on it for example. With lambda the all images are resized for you in parallel, so total 100ms. If this was servers, would have to run 100 servers to give you the same performance You're probably just simplifying, but to clarify servers can totally do multiple things at once. That's how Amazon runs multiple lambdas on one physical server.
  - sudhirj 5y ago
    They can, and these are already multi core operations. If takes 4 cores 100ms to do this operation, so on a server with 4 cores doing a 100 of them takes 10 seconds, while on lambda it takes only 0.1 seconds to to them all in parallel.