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Comment by joshuahutt | Hacker News Reader

One thing I am struggling to understand is how much of my applications can be replaced with Lambda.

I think it would be really awesome to make applications that do not have any dedicated instances associated with them, but are entirely based on the various AWS platforms.

For some things, it seems like Lambda could be a drop-in replacement, whereas others, it would not quite fit the bill. Do you think it will be possible to build a viable a "server-free" application with Lambda and the other services (S3, DynamoDB)? Or is it probably going to be limited to the types of use cases listed on the landing page[1]?

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/

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It is completely possible. Consider that the major uses for a server are interacting with clients, storing data (backend database) and manipulating that data. Here the clients can interact directly with S3/Dynamo, this in turn will trigger Lambda functions to manipulate data, and the round trip can be accomplished via SNS.

Of course, it would be much more viable to have some sort of server running (for example I doubt Netflix has replaced their entire backend with Lambda functions), but a great majority of workflows dealing with stateless data manipulation and events can now be streamlined and even replaced.

I recently had to set up a system to generate thumbnails from images uploaded into S3; precisely the example they give. This would be a godsend and replace a lot of complicated queues and ruby processes running on an army of EC2 instances.

Oh what I would have given to have this capability a year ago. :)

You cant (at present) execute code on a GET request, so you need to have static content pushed to S3 as the basis for your app. You can update it on POST/PUT though, so you can construct an application via that.

I think it's completely possible. Amazon has all the pieces you need (compute and storage). That being said, you may need to wait for ec2 events to do some really complicated stuff.

It seems like you're limited to 25 concurrent lambda functions executing (at least at this time).

This looks like it's more geared towards enabling you to automate / orchestrate your AWS resources, that run customer-facing code.

The 25 function limit is probably one of those small defaults that's easy to change, like the 20 instance limit.

True, its likely just like all other limits; arbitrarily small for anyone by default to prevent you from having an errant process spin up a ton of resources that you'd be expected to pay for.

Just like how you can get specific increases on your spot bids so long as you acknowledge that if you get a spot spike, and your personal limit is far greater than the spike -- you'll be charged your rate.

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