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This is another example of AWS over marketing Lambda. Lambda is horrendously expensive when requests pass a certain level per second. You can graph it against E

by ctvo 5y ago

This is another example of AWS over marketing Lambda. Lambda is horrendously expensive when requests pass a certain level per second. You can graph it against ECS / EC2 to see the point it stops becoming economical. Taking all of this into account, Lambda is then useful for a very small niche: - Tasks that don't care about low P99 latency. These tend to be asynchronous processing workflows, as APIs in the customer request path tend to care about low P99 latency. - Tasks that have a low request per second. Again, these tend to be asynchronous processing workflows. You talk to anyone on the AWS serverless team and the conversation eventually focuses on toil. If you can quantify engineering toil for your organization, and give it a number, the point at which Lambda stops being economical shifts right, but it doesn't change the overall shape of the graph.

mhaymo 5y ago
In my experience cold starts don't affect the p99 if you have substantial traffic, because you have enough lambdas consistently running that cold start rate is ~0.1%. P99.9 also matters though!
- earthboundkid 5y ago
  If you have substantial traffic, the cost savings of Lambda are gone, and you can just use ECS or something.
earthboundkid 5y ago
I use Netlify serverless functions (which is just a wrapper around AWS Lambda) because it basically fits the criteria for me. I have a low but bursty access pattern that fits into the free tier, and there's a static SPA page that can serve up instantly while the XHR triggers to do the cold start fetch. I don't think I would use it for anything consumer facing though. This is just a backend where an extra 300ms isn't going to make a big difference to the admins.
nuerow 5y ago
> This is another example of AWS over marketing Lambda. Lambda is horrendously expensive when requests pass a certain level per second. I feel this is a gross misrepresentation of AWS Lambdas. AWS lambdas are primarily tailored for background processes, event handlers, and infrequent invocations. This is how they are sold, including in AWS' serverless tutorials. Even though they can scale like crazy, and even though you can put together an API with API Gateway or even Application Load Balancer, it's widely known that if your API handles more more traffic than a few requests per second then you're better off putting together your own service. The rationale is that if you don't need to do much with a handler, or you don't expect to handle a lot of traffic on a small number of endpoints, AWS lambdas offer a cheaper solution to develop and operate. In some cases (most happy path cases?), they are actually free to use. Beyond a certain threshold, you're better off getting your own service to run on EC2/Fargate/ECS/whatever, specially given that once you have a service up and running then adding a controller is trivial.
- ctvo 5y ago
  > I feel this is a gross misrepresentation of AWS Lambdas. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers, creating workload-aware cluster scaling logic, maintaining event integrations, or managing runtimes. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. Just upload your code as a ZIP file or container image, and Lambda automatically and precisely allocates compute execution power and runs your code based on the incoming request or event, for any scale of traffic. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from over 200 AWS services and SaaS applications or call it directly from any web or mobile app. You can write Lambda functions in your favorite language (Node.js, Python, Go, Java, and more) and use both serverless and container tools, such as AWS SAM or Docker CLI, to build, test, and deploy your functions. https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ Edit: > it's widely known that if your API handles more more traffic than a few requests per second then you're better off putting together your own service. How is it widely known? Is it on their documentation clearly or in their marketing materials to use another AWS product? That's what's I mean by over marketing here. Requiring insider baseball knowledge because using it as described footguns your company at infection points isn't a great customer experience.

by ctvo 5y ago

mhaymo 5y ago

In my experience cold starts don't affect the p99 if you have substantial traffic, because you have enough lambdas consistently running that cold start rate is ~0.1%. P99.9 also matters though!

earthboundkid 5y ago
If you have substantial traffic, the cost savings of Lambda are gone, and you can just use ECS or something.

earthboundkid 5y ago

I use Netlify serverless functions (which is just a wrapper around AWS Lambda) because it basically fits the criteria for me. I have a low but bursty access pattern that fits into the free tier, and there's a static SPA page that can serve up instantly while the XHR triggers to do the cold start fetch. I don't think I would use it for anything consumer facing though. This is just a backend where an extra 300ms isn't going to make a big difference to the admins.

nuerow 5y ago

> This is another example of AWS over marketing Lambda. Lambda is horrendously expensive when requests pass a certain level per second. I feel this is a gross misrepresentation of AWS Lambdas. AWS lambdas are primarily tailored for background processes, event handlers, and infrequent invocations. This is how they are sold, including in AWS' serverless tutorials. Even though they can scale like crazy, and even though you can put together an API with API Gateway or even Application Load Balancer, it's widely known that if your API handles more more traffic than a few requests per second then you're better off putting together your own service. The rationale is that if you don't need to do much with a handler, or you don't expect to handle a lot of traffic on a small number of endpoints, AWS lambdas offer a cheaper solution to develop and operate. In some cases (most happy path cases?), they are actually free to use. Beyond a certain threshold, you're better off getting your own service to run on EC2/Fargate/ECS/whatever, specially given that once you have a service up and running then adding a controller is trivial.

ctvo 5y ago
> I feel this is a gross misrepresentation of AWS Lambdas. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers, creating workload-aware cluster scaling logic, maintaining event integrations, or managing runtimes. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. Just upload your code as a ZIP file or container image, and Lambda automatically and precisely allocates compute execution power and runs your code based on the incoming request or event, for any scale of traffic. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from over 200 AWS services and SaaS applications or call it directly from any web or mobile app. You can write Lambda functions in your favorite language (Node.js, Python, Go, Java, and more) and use both serverless and container tools, such as AWS SAM or Docker CLI, to build, test, and deploy your functions. https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ Edit: > it's widely known that if your API handles more more traffic than a few requests per second then you're better off putting together your own service. How is it widely known? Is it on their documentation clearly or in their marketing materials to use another AWS product? That's what's I mean by over marketing here. Requiring insider baseball knowledge because using it as described footguns your company at infection points isn't a great customer experience.