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Comment by shudza | Hacker News Reader

So what should you use for let say, a backend API service? Don't tell me beanstalk/fargate/etc, because they're actually more expensive.

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Lambda, SQS and SNS.

That’s how just about everyone does backend API services with AWS. You’ll be shocked at how cheap, scalable and bullet-proof it can be.

Until you reach scale, and then you’ll typically end up migrating off of those services onto EC2 where a $10k/yr machine can process many orders of magnitude more requests for the same price.

Lambda, etc, just doesn’t scale well financially if you’re doing millions of requests per day.

Then as the OP said, AWS isn't for you if you have a constant 24/7 compute load. In my case the load is very bursty. I sometimes do millions of requests per day, but I typically don't. We lowered our TCO by 75% by moving from on-prem to AWS and using Lambda. It really comes down to your compute load profile.

The Lambda "developer experience" is mediocre at best. Performance is often highly variable. And when you reach a certain point, you'll get much better bang for the buck with EC2. Everything can be cheap when you have very little traffic.

Unless your app is doing a lot of compute. We tried moving our workers to lambda, it was 10x the cost vs an EC2 auto scaling group

Lambda is an option, it's been a very attractive one for me.

AWS lambda is super cheap at tiny scale. But if you get into any real constant load, it is way more expensive than a VM.

The other drawback of lambda is the flip side of having the server opaquely managed by AWS. It is so opaque you can't debug anything. At one startup we had a weird connectivity issue from lambda to RDS but it was impossible to diagnose given the lack of access so it went on for months.

Had it been running in a VM, I could've diagnosed that within an hour with tcpdump and bpf et.al.

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