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Comment by southpolesteve | Hacker News Reader

I can empathize with the OP. Using Lambda in production still has some pretty rough edges. You basically have to use one of the deployment tools/frameworks out there[1]. There are also just certain things it won't do (someone else mentioned binary data). Learning some of the limits takes time and it is not always super clear.

But my personal experience says Lambda is ready for prime time. We use it in production. ~15 million API calls per day. Mostly user facing HTTP requests. Even with the rough edges I would prefer to use it for any new web development project. It feels like at least an order of magnitude reduction in risk/complexity of scaling and deploying code. Its not "zero" but that is huge for me and for my team. We spend more time shipping.

[1]We wrote one: https://github.com/bustlelabs/shep but there are plenty of others mentioned in the comments.

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> ~15 million API calls per day

Isn't that horrifically expensive?

Define horrific. The traffic that generates those calls also generates lots of revenue :) It is also extremely spikey. This is a big win for Lambda since we are only pay for what we need and don't have to worry about scaling EC2 up and down to meet demand.

I have one hard example I can share. We had a node service that was running on ec2 and cost ~$2500/mo. Moved the code directly over to lambda. Now ~$400/mo.

Quantifying other costs is a bit harder but do you have a DevOps person on your team? Or multiple people? How much do they get paid?

Guessing they use API gateway so that's:

$3.50(cost per million calls)*15 = $52.50

Lambda is pretty cheap.

For example a 256 memory function running for 300ms being called 15,000,000 times would cost 21.77.

All together that's $74 a day for just lambda and API gateway without any extras (cache, bandwidth pricing etc).

Maybe more expensive that raw infrastructure but it's a pretty inconsequential amount of money per day for close to no ops.

thanks for doing the math for me :)

So, $2,257/mo for 15Mreq/day ≈ 174req/sec

Practically any smaller instance type (i.e. m3.medium) can handle this small of a load all by itself, without even breaking a sweat.. and instead of paying $74 per day, it would cost less than $74 per month.

In fact, ELB + an ASG of three t2.micro's running continuously would cost around $49 per month, not per day, and possibly around the same amount of effort (or less) to create/maintain/manage.

It's somewhat apples and oranges, but there's no doubt that lambda is expensive compared to plain old EC2, and that cost disparity increases linearly with scale.

Yeah for sure, you're right in that a machine or even machines across different AZ for HA can have better economics for performance.

But you have api management to sort out and versions to solve which api gateway can do fairly easily.

API gateway is connected to Cloudfront for low latency.

You can simply add a cache for your API.

You have analytics already setup up and ready to go.

Also other things like API keys, auth and cognito integration with other integrations etc that API gateway has.

You can deploy and maintain tens of lambda functions fairly easy, to get something similar you would either have to use some container service like ECS or Kubernetes so have to figure them out compared to just deploying your code with one of the frameworks out there for lambda.

That's true, and also you can use all of those (Cloudfront, analytics, API gateway, etc) with EC2 instead if you prefer. API gateway has its own (strengths and) weaknesses compared to a probably more mature server-based API platform. (and don't forget about things like Elastic Beanstalk.)

I'm not looking to put down Lambda, although it could maybe be a bit cheaper; we use EC2/ELB/ASG extensively with Userify but we might use Lambda for eventing-based services in the future. Evaluating each on its own merits will probably give you the best picture of what's right for your project and team.

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