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It's a godsend for me, and I don't use anything else on AWS. The value is that I can run arbitrary programs written in any language, and have it automatically scale up without having to think about VM instances. In my case there's a single (quite complex, cpu intensive) commandline C program that I need to run between zero and hundreds of on demand - I haven't found anything else that lets me do that.

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Out of curiosity, what does your C program do? I don't imagine yours is a typical use case if you don't use any other services (not even S3?) and when you consider that you're limited to 300 seconds of running time and not more than 100 concurrent executions.

I'm going to be purposefully vague to avoid doxxing myself, but it's a lot like the "run" button that compiles the code on the Rust homepage, the difference being that the compiler I'm running is too performance critical to use Emscripten ATM.

What are you using to call your C program? I've been considering possibly a python wrapper?

Yes, did some research and found that the Python run time is the fastest to start up of the various options - all it really does is start up, call the C program, then shut down (<10ms to get to the subprocess.call() if memory serves).

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