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Comment by jacobgkau | Hacker News Reader

> They aren't equivalent at all. The web server is hosted on an OS and both require ongoing maintenance.

From a technical standpoint, surely the servers running Lambda have an OS and require maintenance internally by Amazon at some level (even if it's dev-ops-abstracted away for their operators). It's just their responsibility instead of yours, and it's also their responsibility to find other work for those servers when your code isn't running (or bear the cost of an idle server). It's like if they were letting you push PHP functions to their web server, using the quoted comparison.

Useful from a business standpoint, yes. Revolutionary, maybe not as much as it seems at first glance. That's the takeaway I got.

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> Useful from a business standpoint, yes.

This business standpoint is the whole thing, I don’t see many people arguing otherwise. And the business standpoint is in fact quite revolutionary.

Amazon can have a team of like 5 engineers maintaining VM images and as a result 500,000 other people don’t have to. And so you can host a “server” that’s only “on” when it’s in use, and usually end up paying less than $1/mo.

In fact, you could likely run all of your side projects in lambda and if they’re “conventional web server” type things you could still end up paying less than $1/mo across all of them.

Compare that to a $5/mo droplet for every side project (you probably don’t want to bunk multiple services into a $5 VM) and it definitely adds up before even considering updating the OS on those droplets.

And, of course, they don't just "bear the cost of an idle server". Just like any other fixed costs in any other industry, those costs get smeared over the charged prices. Unless there is some serious economy of scale (i.e. ops at Amazon managing to handle the upkeep of a 1000 of their servers for less than 1/1000 it costs you to manage 1 of your server), you're ending up paying somewhat more. But then again, you don't have to spend time to manage your own server which is probably a positive trade-off.

>> somewhat

It's a factor of 5 to 20 [1] in many cases.

Regular hosting is unbelievably cheap, especially in high traffic environments.

[1] https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-...

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