3 ms·

In other words, they had an average of 6.3 lambda invocations per second. Why make it sound so sensational? I did much more than that on a single xeon machine.

• geraldwhen 3y ago
  Yes, but that wouldn’t require so many hoops to jump through to make work, and it would probably cost a lot less. You have to use lambda so you can overcome artificial engineering constraints so that you can write blog posts.
• BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  A cheap VPS could output much more, for 5 dollars a month.
• QuadrupleA 3y ago
  Most of our apps, on a single t3a.nano (about $3/mo) can handle about 250 req / sec in stress tests. In sluggish python no less. People don't seem to understand modern compute speeds.
  • paulddraper 3y ago
    Does your app do more or less work?
• citrin_ru 3y ago
  Xeon has a long history, but even around 2005 50 rps from a single box with perl web app was not considered highload.
• tomnipotent 3y ago
  They claim to need 25 medium or 6 xlarge EC2 instances to handle ~17M monthly invocations, which seems insane. I don't know everything they're doing under the hood, but I'd expect to be able to handle billions of requests with that much hardware considering the product offering.
  • Nihilartikel 3y ago
    I'm similarly mystified. I have first hand experience with that volume of traffic.. Per day. Per host. In 2009. On python. How is everyone making everything so slow?
• kgeist 3y ago
  I thought lambdas are practical when they're called rarely, with a surge of traffic occasionally? So that you don't pay for the servers when they're unused, and occasionally you can withstand black friday traffic. If a lambda is called 6 times per second, I suspect the underlying VMs/containers that power lambdas are rarely shut down (I don't know how AWS works but that's how it works in another cloud provider I'm familiar with - they wait for a little for new requests before shutting down the container). So might've as well just used an always-on server. I also wonder why their calculations show that 6rps (that's what their "17 mln monthly lambda invocations" really means) would require 25 servers. We have a single mediocre VM which serves around 6 rps on average as well without issues... Although, of course, it all depends on what kind of load each request has. We don't do number crunching and most of the time is spent in the database.
  • civilitty 3y ago
    If they’re called rarely, they have poor latency due to cold start times. IMO lambdas are most practical when someone else in the org is responsible for spinning up VMs and your boss is in a pissing match with their boss, preventing you from getting any new infrastructure to get work done. The technical merits rarely have anything to do with it.
    • steveBK123 3y ago
      "it costs 2x as much but doesn't require me to navigate my messed up IT org" is an underappreciated motivation for a lot of architectures you see people pump. Your IT org political problems may not match, and therefore their architecture may not either. Also there's the question of what problem you are trying to scale at what scale, with what resiliency/uptime requirements, etc...
      • jamesfinlayson 3y ago
        Agreed - I worked at a company that couldn't get some expensive security tool approved so they just bought it off AWS Marketplace. The AWS bill was high enough that the increase wasn't questioned.
• tuetuopay 3y ago
  They talk about lambdas that exceed the max runtime of 15 minutes. For a single invocation. They go to great lengths talking about cron jobs, background jobs triggered by events, etc. I highly doubt the bulk of the lambdas they talk about are simple API calls. Otherwise yes, 6-7rps is peanuts, if we’re talking about API calls. And since the very first point of the article is them highlighting what goes to lambda and what does not (public api calls go to a dedicated box), I think it’s safe to say those 6 invocations/sec are definitely not API calls. TL;DR your Xeon box is their always-on api box.