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Comment by munns | Hacker News Reader

Awesome! That was the idea here. Lots of sub 100ms workloads and we really want you to be able to pay for what you use.

- Chris, Serverless@AWS

> ...we really want you to be able to pay for what you use.

Cloudflare Workers has the right pricing model. They only charge for CPU time and not wall time. They also do not charge for bandwidth.

> Lots of sub 100ms workloads...

AWS Lambda (or Lambda at Edge), as it stands, is 10x more expensive for sub 50ms workloads (Workers does allow upto 100ms for the 99.9th percentile) that can fit 128MB RAM.

https://medium.com/@zackbloom/serverless-pricing-and-costs-a...

Except that none of the rest of your infrastructure is there, and that APIs represent just a non-majority part of Lambda workloads.

To be clear, you're acknowledging Cloudflare has a much better pricing model but just not as many other services yet?

No to be clear I'm saying you are comparing things that are way more different than our friends at Cloudflare would like you to think. They aren't brought up in any of the convos I have with customers.

But you're telling us that Lambda's prices are justifiably higher because of the strong vendor lock-in? AWS is starting to sound more like Oracle. Ironic. :)

Besides the fact that Cloudflare's part of the Bandwidth Alliance with GCP and other infrastructure providers from which AWS is conspicuously absent, Cloudflare's also slowly but surely building a portfolio of cloud services.

This reply is in bad faith. He did not attempt to "justify" the pricing with "vendor lock-in". Indeed, the prices went down, not up.

Lambda's pricing is indeed higher than Cloudflare Workers for sub 50ms workloads (that fit 128MB RAM).

Cloudflare's alliance with other infrastructure providers mean Cloudflare's platform isn't really limited to "API" workloads. This is discounting the fact that Cloudflare recently announced Workers Unlimited for workloads that need to run longer (upto 30mins) though then they do charge for bandwidth.

The question here isn't the price change here (which is in some sense mainly about balancing short functions and long functions, removing the penalty for short functions) , it's where the pricing is at overall vs Cloudflare.

> No to be clear I'm saying you are comparing things that are way more different than our friends at Cloudflare would like you to think.

Care to expand on that? What exactly do you mean by "things are way more different"?

This is pretty standard AWS marketing spiel. They make vague assertions of "ah but you're not considering the big picture...." with no details

Based. "That's just an edge case. Our customers love this service!"

It's like going to a restaurant that uses bottled water instead of tap water, and they dont provide an answer as to what the benefits of bottled water are

If you want to compare two things that are different in a ton of ways, don't be mad when someone points it out.

It isn't about the products, it is about the pricing model in a similar market.

Second, for sub 50ms workloads [0], Workers is absolutely a superior solution to API Gateway + Lambda or Cloudfront + Lambda at Edge if the workloads can fit 128MB RAM and package/compile to 1MB JavaScript or WASM executables, in terms of cost, speed, latency, ease of development etc

[0] For Workers, 50ms is all CPU time and that is definitely not the case with Lambda which may even charge you for the time it takes to setup the runtime to run the code and time spent doing Network IO and bandwith and RAM and vCPUs and what not.

Last I looked Cloudflare Workers had different limits and constraints:

https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits

It's a quick Google. 128MB max memory, 6 concurrent out going connections max, 1MB code size limit. The use case here is a subset of what AWS Lambda can handle. The supported languages also differ (only things that have a JS / wasm conversion for Cloudflare Workers).

I haven't looked deeply, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand there's also restrictions on the built-in APIs available [1] and npm packages supported for NodeJS.

I would assume some of the above contributes to the price difference.

1 - https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/web-s...

Not from AWS, but the isolation model is completely different.

On Lambda you get a full environment inside an OS container. On CloudFlare you get a WASM process.

The Lambda model is more compatible which can be a real benefit.

This comment would be much more useful if you gave some clear examples of the difference (presumably something you get on Lambda that makes it worth more per ms than Cloudflare).

Otherwise it's just "AWS said, Cloudflare said"

They're not easily comparable (I tried using Cloudflare Workers before going back to AWS). Lambda@Edge runs Node or Python. Cloudflare Workers runs V8 with "worker isolates" which has a few more caveats, an imperfect but improving dev experience, and doesn't work with a lot of npm packages.

What would be really useful for my use case (running browser tests on a schedule) is if Cloudflare workers actually supported running full headless chromium automation in addition to just V8 isolates. Right now I'm using puppeteer/playwright + Lambda, but would love to have more options.

Headless browser tests seem to be quite far away from the problems cloudflare workers are trying to solve.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits

Workers aren't the same as lambdas, they are a super slim JS environments. At 50ms max runtime most browsers won't even start, let alone fetch and process a page.

CloudWatch Synthetics may fit your usecase? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...

Then there are more specialized browser-testing providers like LambdaTest.com and BrowserStack.com

and the venerable WPT (private instances, not the free public one at webpagetest.org)

I wished Google Cloud supported something similar Lambda@edge but I think my only alternative is Cloudflare Workers at the moment.

It's nice to get a semi-official confirmation of AWS pricing strategy: create lock in, then overcharge.

Yet, if you're a Cloudflare user, all of your edges are there - so it doesn't matter. We use Workers extensively for "edge" related things. Lambda, never - but for working with S3 buckets, sure. They feel similar, but differently specialized.

Lambdas are UDFs for S3.

> They also do not charge for bandwidth.

Is there fine print on this? Can I put 100TB / mo through their caching servers at the lowest $20 price tier?

Yes, but you'll probably get an email about it.

Not if you're actually taking up that much cache storage but bandwidth has plenty of examples of high usage on low tiers. They usually allow it as long as you're not affecting the rest of the network adversely since the lines are already paid for (which is the right approach IMO).

Very high bandwidth usage for Cloudflare Workers workloads is not against ToS according to Cloudflare's CEO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790857

That's because keeping track of request state is not free. Ask an edge router. If you have a request open, even though it's not doing CPU, that request has to be in a queue somewhere, tracked for a response that can be transmitted back.

I don't know the infra costs of operating lambda, but my guess is that it's far from CPU-dominated.

I would not be surprised if the Cloudflare pricing model is making a tradeoff to make CPU-bound workloads pay for more of the infra than the rest. It's a valid trade-off to make as a business offering, and it might be feasible given the mixture of workloads. Whether it's the right way is debatable. Whether this model can be tanked by an army of actors taking advantage of CPU-insensitive pricing remains to be seen, or is an acceptable risk that you can take (which you can observe and protect against).

>> AWS Lambda (or Lambda at Edge), as it stands, is 10x more expensive for sub 50ms workloads

Not sure about this, most use cases of Lambda use other resources and do not exist in a vacuum. Comparison should be made using complete systems not only parts.

Chris, while I've seen the change in my accounts on regular Lambda, I don't yet see it on Lambda@Edge. I think Lambda@Edge is the place where we'd benefit from this change the most, because many L@E scenarios take single-digit milliseconds, and the cost of L@E is 3x regular Lambda.

Any word on whether we'll also see this change on L@E billing?

Yes, to be clear this change was just for Lambda. L@E is honestly a completely different service run by a different part of AWS that just happens to share parts of our core worker platform. I am not 100% aware of when they might adjust their own pricing on this, but also couldn't share any roadmap here (sorry).

How does that even work? Lambda seems like a challenge even with the entirety of the datacenter resources to work with. Running it in constrained edge environments with a VM per function seems like black magic.

The naming is a bit of a misnomer, today L@E doesn't run at the edge (in our PoPs) but when you deploy it copies to every region and then CloudFront routes you to the lowest latency region for your request.

So is L@E multi region then? Like if I have two concurrent requests across the globe are they serviced from two locations?

Yes, but you deploy it from one region.

Wait, are you Chris Munns from Music2Go? If so, massively small world. My email is username @setec.io; would love to hear from you.

-Harlan, the ex-intern

It me.

I have only a lambda@edge function which usually runs between 10-20ms.

If this also covers lambda@edge, this will save us quite some money.

Hi, are there any plans on offering instances with more CPU cores than the maximum 2 as I guess you have today?

Yes, announced today you can go up to 10gb/6 vCPUs: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-function...

Okay, nice. And if I would like like 32 vCpus? Having an application today that has a huge degree of parallelism, but utilizing an external cloud provider that offers dedicated machines with very affordable pricing. Would really like to use lambdas instead though.

Interesting. Not possible today. We'd still encourage paralyzation up through multiple concurrency of functions being executed.

I would love to see this as well: having 96-vCPU Lambda instances (or instances that match the biggest C-family instance you have) would solve a lot of problems for me. The execution model of Lambda (start a runtime, handle requests, AWS handles pool management) feels much easier to use than managing a pool.

Someone from AWS once commented to me that "if you're ever having to manage a pool rather than letting us manage it, that's a gap in our services".

"paralyzation" -> parallelization, yeah? :)

It was a long day yesterday, thank you :)

Hey Chris. Happy to see your awesome trajectory from Meetup admin to The Serverless AWS guy.

::waves at Yuri::

Thanks! It's been a fun/interesting 4 years in this space :)

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