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What is the benefit of AWS Lambda vs getting a cheap VPS or a dedicated server with much better specs and bandwidth, setting it up and adding auto-update? And how does one prevent going bankrupt if a Lambda app is DDOSed?

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The cost is stupidly low. You would really have to work hard to go bankrupt.

That said, there is a concurrency limit, which would help prevent your server time going to exponential limits.

Article doesn't mention any numbers. OVH VPS is $3.50 for a 2GB RAM and 100mbs (about 14TB a month assuming 50% utilization). That is about 14mln pages with 1MB size vs 1mln requests for API Gateway at $3.50, not including Lambda costs or bandwidth costs.

I don't have exact numbers, but we have dozens of lambda functions written in Python which are parsing and acting on Kinesis log streams (at volumes that cause problems for the Splunk ingest), and regularly hit the 100 process concurrency limit... but our bill is well under $10 a year (yes, year, not month. Hence my use of the adjectives "ridiculously" and "stupidly").

Luck? Hidden discounts? Don't know. Just know that our bill is ridiculously low for everything we're doing.

Auto updates can break shit; you need to monitor and understand the output of the auto update script. That understanding doesn't come cheap.

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