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As I recall, https://icloudguru.com/ https://icloudguru.com/ used serverless to serve their video lessons and said they were paying pennies. I wonder what they

As I recall, https://icloudguru.com/ https://icloudguru.com/ used serverless to serve their video lessons and said they were paying pennies. I wonder what they're doing differently. I tried searching for the original article, but it's too ambiguous with their general offerings, so no luck.

mixdup 3y ago
>I wonder what they're doing differently Largest thing that stands out to me is simply scale
zamnos 3y ago
Just serve and not transcode? Because it sounds like the Amazon Prime microservice was doing some heavy processing of uploaded video - breaking it into frames and applying some ML algorithms to them, and also the same with the audio. Sounds like even if you can fit in under the 10 min lamda execution timeout (assuming internal teams are limited to the same), that AWS Lambda/Step Functions isn't a generic job queue handler and is not infinitely parallel like AWS would want you to believe. It's a bitl ike using an SQL database for streamed append-only logging. It'll work in test, with test amounts of data, but doesn't actually scale.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  Writing every frame to S3 and reading them back in other steps was probably a major factor.
  - traspler 3y ago
    There is not much of an option with step functions, outputs/inputs can be max 256KB so especially if you go into or out of a map/parallel state you can‘t do much more than pass references to the data and not the data itself.
    - emodendroket 3y ago
      Sure but I guess I mean the nature of that task probably made them the wrong architectural choice.
bdcravens 3y ago
Serverless isn't "cheap". It's rightsized. If you aren't serving 24/7, it makes sense to move to an on-demand model. However if you compare the unit of compute pricing, Lambda is comparable to other services, and likely more expensive than buying compute wholesale. You can just buy it in smaller portions.

mixdup 3y ago

>I wonder what they're doing differently Largest thing that stands out to me is simply scale

zamnos 3y ago

Just serve and not transcode? Because it sounds like the Amazon Prime microservice was doing some heavy processing of uploaded video - breaking it into frames and applying some ML algorithms to them, and also the same with the audio. Sounds like even if you can fit in under the 10 min lamda execution timeout (assuming internal teams are limited to the same), that AWS Lambda/Step Functions isn't a generic job queue handler and is not infinitely parallel like AWS would want you to believe. It's a bitl ike using an SQL database for streamed append-only logging. It'll work in test, with test amounts of data, but doesn't actually scale.

emodendroket 3y ago
Writing every frame to S3 and reading them back in other steps was probably a major factor.
- traspler 3y ago
  There is not much of an option with step functions, outputs/inputs can be max 256KB so especially if you go into or out of a map/parallel state you can‘t do much more than pass references to the data and not the data itself.
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    Sure but I guess I mean the nature of that task probably made them the wrong architectural choice.

bdcravens 3y ago

Serverless isn't "cheap". It's rightsized. If you aren't serving 24/7, it makes sense to move to an on-demand model. However if you compare the unit of compute pricing, Lambda is comparable to other services, and likely more expensive than buying compute wholesale. You can just buy it in smaller portions.