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Its loved because it means your technical costs are always guaranteed to be a % of your total computing needs, and your computing needs should (theoretically) a

by ep103 5y ago

Its loved because it means your technical costs are always guaranteed to be a % of your total computing needs, and your computing needs should (theoretically) always be proportional to your total company revenue. From a business standpoint, that's a pretty great pitch. Is it actually the most cost effective solution? No more so than any other tool. It depends on exactly what you're building, how, and how you measure the cost. AWS can be extremely costly, or cheap, depending on your engineering needs, constraints, and practices.

deleted 5y ago
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timr 5y ago
I have been at exactly one (web) company in my life where the cost of computing resources actually mattered, and compared to bandwidth, even that didn't matter. The companies I have been at where computing costs did matter were doing extremely specialized, long-running calculations that are inappropriate for lambda. I'm sure there are rare exceptions, but this all smells like premature optimization. Developer salaries are, 9.99 times out of ten, the cost you want to optimize.
sam0x17 5y ago
Another area that this workflow really empowers is it frees you up to have infinite and arbitrary staging environments. In our case we have a GitHub action set up that creates a fully deployed version of the app for every PR automatically, and a bot that comments on the PR with a link to the deployment. You can of course do this with any kind of infrastructure, but only with a serverless sort of architecture is it virtually free to do this kind of thing. On the db side, we allocate extremely tiny instances so it is still quite affordable to just have one running for all of our branches. They are automatically destroyed when the PR is closed so the overhead is basically $5/month for each PR that is open for a whole month (in practice they are open for a few days at most).
- atmosx 5y ago
  This is an interesting use case, thanks for sharing although these days, setting up kubernetes environment emulators is supported by most CI systems out of the box.

by ep103 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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timr 5y ago

I have been at exactly one (web) company in my life where the cost of computing resources actually mattered, and compared to bandwidth, even that didn't matter. The companies I have been at where computing costs did matter were doing extremely specialized, long-running calculations that are inappropriate for lambda. I'm sure there are rare exceptions, but this all smells like premature optimization. Developer salaries are, 9.99 times out of ten, the cost you want to optimize.

sam0x17 5y ago

Another area that this workflow really empowers is it frees you up to have infinite and arbitrary staging environments. In our case we have a GitHub action set up that creates a fully deployed version of the app for every PR automatically, and a bot that comments on the PR with a link to the deployment. You can of course do this with any kind of infrastructure, but only with a serverless sort of architecture is it virtually free to do this kind of thing. On the db side, we allocate extremely tiny instances so it is still quite affordable to just have one running for all of our branches. They are automatically destroyed when the PR is closed so the overhead is basically $5/month for each PR that is open for a whole month (in practice they are open for a few days at most).

atmosx 5y ago
This is an interesting use case, thanks for sharing although these days, setting up kubernetes environment emulators is supported by most CI systems out of the box.