7 ms·

Insanely expensive is definitely a flexible term. I think numbers help here. Provisions Concurrency $8.64 / GB / month 256 MB per Lambda (Assuming Python, Rub

by wmfiv 5y ago

Insanely expensive is definitely a flexible term. I think numbers help here. Provisions Concurrency $8.64 / GB / month 256 MB per Lambda (Assuming Python, Ruby, NodeJS, or Rust) $2.16 per Lambda per month A lot of organizations can probably make a good business case for keeping 100s or even 1000s of Lambda's warm. You also don't need to keep them warm 24x7, can get an additional 12% discount using savings plans, and if you're a big guy you get your EDP discount.

VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
I'm sure there are plenty of companies that are happy to throw $5,000/mo at a problem that can be solved better for $250/mo. Not mine though.
- count 5y ago
  Does your $250/mo include all the ops cost of other solutions?
  - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
    Yes it does
    - slownews45 5y ago
      You should look at offering this as a service perhaps. 2,500 250MB lambdas for $250/month with all AWS guarantees (ie, Multi-AZ, permissioning on every call etc etc) would be pretty compelling I think for folks running intermediate lambda workloads (ie, 5-10K lambadas at a time).
      - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
        I'm not trying to offer it as a service. I'm trying to run my workload in a way that can scale from 0 -> 10,000 request/second in an instant and doesn't cost my company $5,000/month to do so. It's pretty easy if you know what you're doing (or care to figure it out).
        slownews45 5y ago
        If you can do $250/month with all ops costs and features of lambda for 5,000 or 10,000 requests per second - you would be silly not to offer a service. There are plenty of us who can run a system that scales to 10krps. That's relatively easy? I personally can't stand lambda and don't use it FWIW. I like EC2, I actually like fargate a lot of all sorts of things including lambda like services without a separate lambda for each request. But for folks with a payload, that want the lambda like experience - if you have a solution, all ops cost included (ie, no well paid developer or ops person needed for customer) for $250/month for the scale we are talking here (2,500 x 250MB = 625GB etc) then you have an amazing solution going especially if you can do the networking, IAM controls etc that aws provides. The problem I've seen, when folks say amazon is "insanely expensive" they are usually not actually comparing the AWS offering to a similar offering. If your cheap solution is not lambda like, you need to compare to EC2 or similar (with perhaps a good programmer doing something a bit more monolithic than aws).
    - count 5y ago
      You could make a fortune selling that by itself, unless your ops cost is just yolo provisioning and never doing backups/patching/etc.
      - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
        I'll never understand how we got to this point of learned helplessness where people think hosted services like Lambda are the only ones capable of being secure and robust. It's madness..
        count 5y ago
        That's not what I said or implied.
        VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
        I'm not sure what you're trying to say then. > your ops cost is just yolo provisioning and never doing backups/patching. You think Amazon is the only one capable of doing backups and keeping software up to date?
        count 5y ago
        No, but I think that it's super common to discount to $0 all the work that using lambda saves you from maintenance and operations. And if you can do any of that at scale for $250/mo you're lightyears ahead of nearly everyone.
idunno246 5y ago
it ends up being cheaper overall if you have high utilization of your provisioning since the per second fee while a function is running is cheaper. using https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/Lambda https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/Lambda, if you have a steady 1 request/s and each requests takes 1 second, 2592000 seconds in a month. at 1024mb, i get 36.52 for provisioned and 43.72 for on demand. With autoscaling...you wont get 100% utilization, but it probably ends up being close enough to a wash
WatchDog 5y ago
1 GB of lambda provisioned concurrency is $10.95 USD a month in us-east-1. That's what you pay for your lambda sitting there doing nothing. You can get an on-demand ec2 instance with 1 GB of RAM, for $9.13 USD a month, or $6.87 if you get a reserved instance. You can fully utilize those instances the whole month. Source: https://calculator.aws/#/estimate?id=7e1d1c2f32a2c63ba4ded195ac329008011b73ef https://calculator.aws/#/estimate?id=7e1d1c2f32a2c63ba4ded19...
- wmfiv 5y ago
  Yeah I used the ARM price. I should have pointed that out. It's definitely a tradeoff. Here's a few things I think are advantageous for Lambda, * Integration with all the AWS Event Sources. * Faster autoscaling. * No need to setup a VPC (subnets, NAT gateway, security groups, VPC endpoints potentially, etc) * No need to setup autoscaling, multi-AZ, etc. * No need to support long lived instances. I don't think one is always better than the other.

by wmfiv 5y ago

VWWHFSfQ 5y ago

I'm sure there are plenty of companies that are happy to throw $5,000/mo at a problem that can be solved better for $250/mo. Not mine though.

count 5y ago
Does your $250/mo include all the ops cost of other solutions?
- VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  Yes it does
  - slownews45 5y ago
    You should look at offering this as a service perhaps. 2,500 250MB lambdas for $250/month with all AWS guarantees (ie, Multi-AZ, permissioning on every call etc etc) would be pretty compelling I think for folks running intermediate lambda workloads (ie, 5-10K lambadas at a time).
    - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
      I'm not trying to offer it as a service. I'm trying to run my workload in a way that can scale from 0 -> 10,000 request/second in an instant and doesn't cost my company $5,000/month to do so. It's pretty easy if you know what you're doing (or care to figure it out).
      - slownews45 5y ago
        If you can do $250/month with all ops costs and features of lambda for 5,000 or 10,000 requests per second - you would be silly not to offer a service. There are plenty of us who can run a system that scales to 10krps. That's relatively easy? I personally can't stand lambda and don't use it FWIW. I like EC2, I actually like fargate a lot of all sorts of things including lambda like services without a separate lambda for each request. But for folks with a payload, that want the lambda like experience - if you have a solution, all ops cost included (ie, no well paid developer or ops person needed for customer) for $250/month for the scale we are talking here (2,500 x 250MB = 625GB etc) then you have an amazing solution going especially if you can do the networking, IAM controls etc that aws provides. The problem I've seen, when folks say amazon is "insanely expensive" they are usually not actually comparing the AWS offering to a similar offering. If your cheap solution is not lambda like, you need to compare to EC2 or similar (with perhaps a good programmer doing something a bit more monolithic than aws).
  - count 5y ago
    You could make a fortune selling that by itself, unless your ops cost is just yolo provisioning and never doing backups/patching/etc.
    - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
      I'll never understand how we got to this point of learned helplessness where people think hosted services like Lambda are the only ones capable of being secure and robust. It's madness..
      - count 5y ago
        That's not what I said or implied.
        VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
        I'm not sure what you're trying to say then. > your ops cost is just yolo provisioning and never doing backups/patching. You think Amazon is the only one capable of doing backups and keeping software up to date?
        count 5y ago
        No, but I think that it's super common to discount to $0 all the work that using lambda saves you from maintenance and operations. And if you can do any of that at scale for $250/mo you're lightyears ahead of nearly everyone.

idunno246 5y ago

it ends up being cheaper overall if you have high utilization of your provisioning since the per second fee while a function is running is cheaper. using https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/Lambda https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/Lambda, if you have a steady 1 request/s and each requests takes 1 second, 2592000 seconds in a month. at 1024mb, i get 36.52 for provisioned and 43.72 for on demand. With autoscaling...you wont get 100% utilization, but it probably ends up being close enough to a wash

WatchDog 5y ago

1 GB of lambda provisioned concurrency is $10.95 USD a month in us-east-1. That's what you pay for your lambda sitting there doing nothing. You can get an on-demand ec2 instance with 1 GB of RAM, for $9.13 USD a month, or $6.87 if you get a reserved instance. You can fully utilize those instances the whole month. Source: https://calculator.aws/#/estimate?id=7e1d1c2f32a2c63ba4ded195ac329008011b73ef https://calculator.aws/#/estimate?id=7e1d1c2f32a2c63ba4ded19...

wmfiv 5y ago
Yeah I used the ARM price. I should have pointed that out. It's definitely a tradeoff. Here's a few things I think are advantageous for Lambda, * Integration with all the AWS Event Sources. * Faster autoscaling. * No need to setup a VPC (subnets, NAT gateway, security groups, VPC endpoints potentially, etc) * No need to setup autoscaling, multi-AZ, etc. * No need to support long lived instances. I don't think one is always better than the other.