Hacker News Reader

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