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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

Note that you should be wary of AWS Lambda limits. We blew through them on our first day directing traffic on a system we were testing with Lambda. They were able to increase our limits a few days later, but something to think about before you base your whole stack around it.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html

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Those will be raised soon.

AWS introduced API Gateway because they want back-ends being built on AWS Lambda. They will raise the limits, but this is all bleeding-edge tech and they are likely moving forward with caution.

They've already increased it from the originally published concurrent requests per function limit (originally 50, now 100) [1]

We'd like the "Total size of all the deployment packages that can be uploaded per account" increased. Since you have to "require in" (as you put it) all your dependencies with each published function it's plausible to hit that limit pretty quick.

The average node module is 1.6MB [2]. If your functions have 3 dependencies, you're near 5MB. That limits you to ~300 functions. That initially seems like a lot until you realize you may have to start breaking up complex logic into multiple functions to hit time limits. You also might need to maintain multiple versions for backwards compatibility (think v1 endpoints). And if you use Java 8, you're just screwed. That size limit can be hit quick.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20150315092544/http://docs.aws.a...

[2] - https://www.npmjs.com/package/npmjs-stats

It might be possible to write a wrapper function that pulls a larger function from S3. I think you get up to 500mb of /tmp storage per function. Obviously the initial startup time would be atrocious but if you have a high enough TPS it wouldn't be hit too often.

I could also see Lambda adding a paid-for option to keep a function "warmed up" at all times.

Also, you can invoke Lambda functions from within a Lambda function. Even Lambda functions on other AWS accounts.

It's going to get crazy up in here...

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