Re:New for AWS Lambda – Environment Variables and Serverless...
by tlrobinson on Sunday November 20, 2016 @04:49PM
(#13001454)
It would be interesting if someone made an EC2 image that implemented the Lambda APIs, and handled as many requests as it could, then optionally delegated the overflow to real Lambda. Like "reserved" Lambdas.
Re:New for AWS Lambda – Environment Variables and Serverless...
by pugz on Sunday November 20, 2016 @06:02PM
(#13001786)
This is a _fascinating_ idea. You could make an image that queried the Lambda API, downloaded all Lambda functions (and their configuration) and served up exactly those functions. Make it completely turnkey.
Hm...
Re:New for AWS Lambda – Environment Variables and Serverless...
by treeder on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @07:21PM
(#13018887)
You might want to check out IronFunctions that was released last week: https://github.com/iron-io/functions . You can run Lambda functions anywhere, can even export/import them directly from Lambda. It doesn't have the burst to Lambda part you speak of though... yet.
Last I calculated, it's nearly 5x the cost of comparable t2 on-demand EC2 instances. That can be mitigated if you have spiky traffic where you'd need to turn on several EC2 instances for less than an hour but are stuck paying for the full hour, or if you can scale to zero for extended periods of time.
Critical to us: you don't have the ability to serve concurrent requests from a single lambda worker, so if you're waiting for async IO (e.g. downloading from S3) then you're wasting money you wouldn't be wasting with EC2. You end up with one file per lambda worker, whereas we could handle about five files concurrently on a normal VM because of async IO. -- For us lambda was prohibitively expensive at scale. I suspect a fair number of people reporting significant savings vs EC2 had over-provisioned instances.