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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they went with AWS Lambda and PHP instead of something serverless-native like Cloudflare Workers? I guess they still have some critical parts of the legacy stack on AWS (DBs especially, but also other AWS services).

I wonder if you can build something like this entirely greenfield today, like what you'd use as a permanent data store for all the transactions, without having to manage the scaling of each individual microservice. Would CF Workers + Durable Objects be able to handle something like that?

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DynamoDB as a data store for transactions works just fine, as long as you are aware of the trade-offs and design a good data model.

Sorry, I didn't mean that as a challenge to AWS, just wondering what the pros/cons/tradeoffs are to each approach.

Also, I just realized "Bref" is its own project that lets you run PHP on serverless Lambdas... like a Google Cloud Run on Amazon?

Is this really such a big niche? It's weird to me to you'd want to use PHP for something like this (and I love PHP, it just doesn't strike me as the best tool for serverless).

As you can see on the website (https://bref.sh/) there's 13 billion monthly AWS Lambda invocations using Bref (PHP).

That doesn't really say much. Isn't the whole point of serverless to support high-volume, individually-inexpensive, invocations?

For context, 13B is like roughly a <strike>$2000</strike> (edit: more like $4000, sorry) spend on Cloudflare Workers, similar cost (harder to calculate but ballpark similar) on Lambda. That could be a single company spending the bulk of that.

(Further edit: Lambda pricing is way off too. See reply below.)

That ballpark is not even close to the park. My company spends ~$500/month on AWS Lambda and we're doing about 2M/req/day with Bref. There's still 12B 940M requests to account for

Thank you, and sorry about that!

How come Lambda is so expensive for you?

At 13000M invocations/mo, that's $2600 in requests. Is it the GB-seconds duration charge that get you?

The GB-second is the relevant cost of AWS Lambda. # of invocations is pretty irrelevant.

60'000'000 requests

1536MB RAM

300ms response avg

(calculation includes free tier):

Request costs: $11.80/month

Execution costs: $443.42/month

Total AWS Lambda costs: $455.22/month

I see, thank you for the explanation! Sorry for my mistaken assumptions.

PHP is great for serverless because its execution model is compatible with it.

Unlike Node, Python, Java, etc. that start a long-lived server, each request is handled by PHP in a separate process.

That's what makes it really to use with serverless (and lift-and-shift, like what Treezor did).

Does that really matter when JS can be isolated in V8?

Comparing Bref (https://bref.sh/docs#maturity-matrix) which inherits Lambda's 200ms+ cold starts vs Cloudflare's 5ms (https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-cold-starts-with-clo...), for example, is a pretty big difference.

But I guess if performance isn't a critical use (or you just have so many invocations all the time in every data center that cold start isn't an issue), it's nice to be able to ~port~ copy and paste over your existing PHP code.

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