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?
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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.
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?