I just hate it that discussions end up in people talking about keeping the function warm and quickly go downhill from there.

A managed app runtime can be great though: for those who tried Google AppEngine back in the day, it was amazing to work with.

>> Our main path business path gets about 60,000 reqs min. For that, sure AWS Lambda would never compete.

I'm curious about this statement because I'm currently working on a project where the intent is to port a legacy app to AWS Lambda. The legacy app is currently distributed across 96 VMs and handles ~ 50K reqs/min during normal times but can run into ~ 3M reqs/min during high demand.

Are you saying AWS Lambda can not scale to handle this type of demand and if so can you point me to some resources/references that explain this?

For the record, I'm not the one that came up with the architecture.

mcrittenden is right in that it probably will cost more to run than just having the old processes run on ECS/EC2. Lambda charges a premium for maintaining its control plane and development of the product that only makes sense to pay if your app has 'idle time'.

But also there is a per account per region concurrency limit of 1000 parallel executions. That's shared across all lambdas. If you hit it, requests will not be for-filed, increasing this limit is entirely at Amazons discretion, and wont they necessarily do it. I stand corrected, see comment.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html

In your case 3m reqs/min will be fine if each request can be completed in no more than 20 milliseconds, and then you'll be on the knife edge.

If you wanted to reap the benefits of Lambda on the development side, loose the limits and keep server costs low(er) you could deploy OpenFaaS or similar in ECS. However you then loose the operational benefits of a managed solution.

The 1000 concurrency is a default limit, and we're very happy to raise it if you need more. The instructions for a limit increase request are here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/concurrent-exec...

(Source: I work on Lambda at AWS)

Fair play - added a correction, that statement came from discussions with our DevOps facility rather than first hand contact with Amazon, so there could be something else going on.

I think he/she meant that Lambda wouldn't compete on pricing (as opposed to on performance).

Both pricing and performance. It will scale, but it’s gonna cost a ton, and won’t be faster than running servers (and could be considerably slower for a percentage of requests).

So the main advantage is that it scales easily, but then it's only cheaper if you actually don't need it to scale?