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Comment by vp8989 | Hacker News Reader

Are you actually likely to have a "high bill" on Lambda but also be "surprised" that all your requests are 30x slower?

Presumably anything that can generate a "high bill" also has some reasonable level of on-call, alerting, SLAs etc ... such that if your Lambda invocations were all taking 30x longer people would notice.

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I really did get a “surprisingly high bill” because of it. It wasn't high in the absolute sense, but it was something like 10x my usual monthly cost in a single day, and would have been higher if I didn't get an alert.

The reason I went for serverless over a server in the first place was so that I wouldn't have to wake up in the middle of the night because of server issues, so alerting is not a satisfying solution. Especially where the problem is more an artifact of how the service is billed than how much it consumes actual server resources.

You're making a tradeoff. You no longer have to alarm for things like your server failing due to disk failure or other stuff that lambda abstracts away from you, but you do have to alarm on things that will increase cost. Constant cost(if you aren't dynamically scaling) and more headache vs variable cost and less headache

It would be a trade-off I'd consider if alternatives didn't exist, but they do. Someone down-thread mentioned Cloudflare Workers, which have a sensible pricing model. These days I use Google Cloud Run, which gives me everything I wanted from Lambda but has model where you pay by CPU time rather than invocation time, and allows a CPU to handle multiple requests.

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