News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:AWS Lambda pricing now per ms by throwaway894345 on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @01:12PM (#25267918)
I haven’t heard that lambdas are “underpowered” before, but I’m interested to learn more. Could you elaborate just a bit on why they are underpowered?
Re:AWS Lambda pricing now per ms by alpha_squared on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @02:35PM (#25268891)
As was mentioned by qvrjuec in a sibling comment, hardware is limited. I seem to remember CPU speeds listed alongside available memory for AWS Lambdas, but the pricing page seems to just list memory now[0]. At the highest end, you're still limited to ~10.2GB of memory, which is considerably lower than what's available via EC2. And while I have no personal experience with the EC2 finer-grained pricing that was announced[1], it sounds like that approach may be a better approach to the described scenario above. We can nitpick on these architectural details, but my response was largely that there are other architectural alternatives that could be more ideal; especially in response to a comment that seems to dismiss the value of pricing at finer time intervals.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/18/aws-starts-charging-for-ec2-...

Re:AWS Lambda pricing now per ms by throwaway894345 on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @04:54PM (#25270489)
> We can nitpick on these architectural details, but my response was largely that there are other architectural alternatives that could be more ideal; especially in response to a comment that seems to dismiss the value of pricing at finer time intervals.

Not trying to nitpick anything; just curious what was meant by "underpowered". Seems like there's still a breadth of compute-intensive use cases that are more appropriate for lambda--e.g., cost is more sensitive than latency and I have too low a volume of requests for a dedicated EC2 instance to make economic sense. This has been where I've spent most of my career, but no doubt there are many use cases where this doesn't hold.

Re:AWS Lambda pricing now per ms by qvrjuec on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @01:40PM (#25268275)
Limitations on hardware one can run a lambda function on and constraints on execution time mean they are "underpowered" compared to other options, like ECS Fargate tasks.
Re:AWS Lambda pricing now per ms by throwaway894345 on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @01:49PM (#25268392)
Does Fargate allow you to run on beefier hardware? I know you can bring your own hardware with vanilla ECS. I’m aware of the execution time constraints (15 minutes), but I thought we were talking about 60s?