> We have over 1000 monitors, and the monthly cost to run them would be $150.
> While on fly we only have 6 servers with 2vcpu/512Mb It cost us $23.34 monthly ($3.89*6).
So edge functions are in no way cost-effective right? People using lambda functions are getting ripped off, they could just buy a couple of VPS.
A non-zero amount of our CICD pipelines are "perform API call with secret pulled from SSM/Secrets Manager". They happen 1-2 times per day and take less than a 5 seconds to run on each invocation. We currently have a burstable EC2 instance running 24/7 to handle these which costs us ~$5/mo. My napkin math says that this would cost us ~$0.01/month to run these as lambdas. More to the point though, we're limited in concurrency on these. It's pretty common that they all get triggered at the same time, it would be ideal if we could allow for an "unlimited" number of these to run. This sort of workload would be great to run for lambda functions, the engineering cost of implementing it just doesn't ever make sense.
If we paid someone $150/hour to spend half a day on it, right now our break even point is probably 5 years...
Or, you use something like Express inside Lambda with Serverless and adapting it to a long running server is literally just deleting the fifty lines of code that export your lambda handler. It couldn't be more simple.
Which is to say, you'll almost always have more trouble going from something else to Lambda and not the other way.
I apologize for the tangent but in your mind, is false sometimes but not always the opposite of true? Or is this just emphasis? (Genuinely asking, not being snarky.)
ETA: Thanks for clarifying.
...which is all extra setup that you need to do compared to if you weren't using lambda, in which case you'd already be set up using something like express. To be fair, it doesn't like it'd be too much work to do the conversion. But it would still be extra work compared to say moving something running on express and deployed in a container to another VPS and/or container hosting provider which would likely require no application changes at all.
You could be switching from an integrated http server to using WSGI, which is almost identical to the effort I described. Who cares about the twenty minutes of work? It's "less portable" in such a trivial way.
Also, it's a 5 line shell script that already depends on 2 AWS services (SSM and IAM) that makes an API call to a third AWS service (S3). It's already locked to AWS
Vercel is basically a dev friendly wrapper for tier 1 services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35774730
Eg. Vercel is 25x more expensive than eg. Cloudflare Workers. Raw guess would be that their 150$ bill would have become 6$.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37891412
Eg. Image resizing
> Vercel : 5$ / 1000 requests
> Cloudflare : 9$ / 50.000 requests
Edit for comment below:
That's a blog post. I got my info from here:
https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/
See: image resizing
> 50,000 monthly resizing requests included with Pro, Business. $9 per additional 50,000 resizing requests
Even coming from a backend-heavy world where one request does a lot of work, that's got to be an order of magnitude off the mark at least. If you go for a frontend-heavy setup where there are more smaller requests (in my experience, common, when using things like Lambda), this could be another order of magnitude off again!
On http requests itselve.
Vercel is 2 $ per million requests. Cloudflare is 0,15$ per million requests.
So Cloudflare in this case is > 13 x cheaper.
On the free plan, it's 100 k. per day included - https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-pricing-scale-to-zero/
https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/ - section: image resizing
My team noticed the same with AWS Aurora Serverless (a database), it was so expensive that it was easier to just run a normal instance of RDS.