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PaaS, Containerization and Serverless are different concepts. App Engine is PaaS: You provide your app to the service in a runnable form (maybe a container ima

PaaS, Containerization and Serverless are different concepts. App Engine is PaaS: You provide your app to the service in a runnable form (maybe a container image, maybe not) and they spin up a dedicated server (or slice of a server) to run it continuously. Lambda is Serverless: You provide them a bit of code and a condition under which that code should run. They charge you only when that thing happens and the code runs. How they make that happen (deploy it to a bajillion servers? Only deploy it when it’s called?) are implementation details that are abstracted from the user/developer as long as Lambda makes sure that the code runs whenever the condition happens. So with PaaS you have to pay even if you have 0 users, and when you scale up you have to do so by spinning up more “servers” (which may result in servers not being fully utilized). With Serverless you pay for the exact amount of compute you need, and 0 if your app is idle.

chubot 2y ago
> They charge you only when that thing happens and the code runs. That's how App Engine worked in 2008, and it looks like it still works that way: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing Apps running in the flexible environment are deployed to virtual machine types that you specify. These virtual machine resources are billed on a per-second basis with a 1 minute minimum usage cost. This applied to both the web workers and the batch workers It was "serverless" in 2008! > spin up a dedicated server (or slice of a server) to run it continuously. Absolutely NOT true of App Engine in 2008, and I'm pretty sure Heroku in 2008 too!
tantalor 2y ago
I recall you could configure app engine with maximum number of instances you wanted, but you definitely weren't charged if usage was 0. They would start the instances as needed. The fact that lambda would automatically scale to meet whatever QPS you got sounds terrifying.

chubot 2y ago

> They charge you only when that thing happens and the code runs. That's how App Engine worked in 2008, and it looks like it still works that way: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing Apps running in the flexible environment are deployed to virtual machine types that you specify. These virtual machine resources are billed on a per-second basis with a 1 minute minimum usage cost. This applied to both the web workers and the batch workers It was "serverless" in 2008! > spin up a dedicated server (or slice of a server) to run it continuously. Absolutely NOT true of App Engine in 2008, and I'm pretty sure Heroku in 2008 too!

tantalor 2y ago

I recall you could configure app engine with maximum number of instances you wanted, but you definitely weren't charged if usage was 0. They would start the instances as needed. The fact that lambda would automatically scale to meet whatever QPS you got sounds terrifying.