>Theoretically, you've taken something that would take 70 hours and had it run in 250ms without having to set up any additional infrastructure.
And you've spent the cost of building out that 8 server infrastructure in one batch.
And you've spent the cost of building out that 8 server infrastructure in one batch.
Assuming 70 hours at $0.000000834/100ms [1]
The whole job costs $2.10.
If you can peg the CPU and don't mind getting interrupted, spot instances are still a fair bit cheaper. But Lambda looks pretty attractive for any other use-case where the statelessness of Lambda doesn't bite you.
Meanwhile, on Lambda, you can actually run 1600 60s jobs (or 27 CPU-hours) in 3 minutes. This is inclusive of setup time, job submission, stragglers, etc. [1]
Of course, if you've got sustained load, it's cheaper to go with spot instances, but the "occasionally I need a buttload of compute," model is well-served by Lambda.
Joyent Manta: https://www.joyent.com/manta
Hyper: http://hyper.sh
Possibly Joyent Triton: https://www.joyent.com/triton
I personally often want to run a bunch of things for ~1-15 minutes, and have too much data or setup to fit neatly in a lambda function. However, I don't need 1000 things running simultaneously, although manta would help still there.
I'd love to see some more layers over the top of services like this, hopefully someday getting us back to picloud. I miss that service.
I also feel like your comment is implying that the outcomes of the lambda option vs the worker server are comparable. As mentioned, the worker machine will still run in hours, rather than less than a second.