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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

> ...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...

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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).

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.

>> 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.

> 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

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