AWS Lambda Trade-offs
Discussions center on the performance issues like cold starts, scalability advantages for bursts, costs, execution limits, and comparisons of AWS Lambda to persistent servers, ECS, or Fargate for various workloads.
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This is not going to scale. Lambdas are hella slow. The cold starts will kill you.
Lambda scales faster if you really do need that. For instance, imagine bursts of 100k requests. Cold start on Lambda is going to be lower than you can autoscale something else.
Not really if you are using FaaS (lambdas)
As far as I know, if you run for more than a few seconds Lambda’s cost will _really_ not worth it. One should prefer ECS or Batch.
Have you noticed any downsides to using Lambda over running a persistent Node server? Is there overhead in execution time, for example?
You have to consider that AWS Lambda does have "cold start" - if your code wasn't run for about 10 minutes it isn't "hot" anymore and will have a penalty time cost to its first next request. This is not billable but it is a latency, explained here [1][1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/operat
That totally depends on what you are doing. We use Lambda to generate thumbnails of documents that are uploaded to one of our applications. I can throw 600-800 pages at it and because it calls a Lambda function per page, the whole thing finishes in less than 10 seconds. No need to scale instances and no need to worry about running out of RAM on our servers. The cold start also gets less after the initial run.
Doesn't lambda have hundreds of thousands of requests for free? Also, the convenience of lambda counts for a lot: no set up or maintenance.
Isn't using a server better in this case? Or Lambda have some benefits in this setup?
Is lambda size related to cold start time ?