Lambda has a ton of caveats and limitations... but it seems their platform is full of limits as well:

https://deno.com/deploy/docs/pricing-and-limits

AWS sucks hairy balls at providing things that are simple for developers to use, so that could be their competitive advantage, but I'm just guessing here.

And deno will also have a lot of limitations

There are many, many companies competing with AWS on products that strictly speaking AWS also has.

I mean Zoom has no right to exist because you can use Chime?

There is always room for better UX, better support, different approach etc.

I find the idea that AWS will just eat the competition always a little silly as well. I've used AWS managed offerings that were far inferior to the alternatives.

So why were you using the AWS managed offering then instead of the alternative?

Usually because the company already pays an AWS bill. No one will care if you add another Lambda function, but to use an alternative you’ll have to get past some gatekeepers.

So there you go. Lots of friction for competitors.

And yet we've never seen anyone beat Amazon yet. Look at how much the PaaS area has churned over the last 10 years. Giants that stuck around like Docker are completely deflated and near worthless compared to their initial values and expectations. The smart ones like Heroku got out when the getting was good.

> And yet we've never seen anyone beat Amazon yet.

That largely depends on your definitions of "beat" and "win". There are plenty of software infrastructure firms out there that Amazon has yet to smash into the ground.

Nature seems to think (and I agree) simply existing is winning.

Please give examples. I would like to learn more about it (even if subjective)

DigitalOcean is a competitor of comparable size (even if its like a pebble to a boulder): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/blavatnik-backed-digitalocean...

I use Digital Ocean and definitely vouch for them. They are way cheaper compared to AWS too. Nice, slick UI too.

Lambda uses containers vs. cloudflare workers use v8 isolates. v8 Isolates are much much faster and more secure for serverless functions.

Deno seems to be targeting cloudflare as a competitor for their service... But it's probable that AWS will release a cloudflare worker competitor themselves if deno continues with the MIT license.

> Lambda uses containers vs. cloudflare workers use v8 isolates. v8 Isolates are much much faster and more secure for serverless functions.

You're right that v8 Isolates are blazing fast, but Lambda runs functions in a microvm spawn by Firecracker [0], which is likely to be more, not less, secure than Isolates [1].

[0] https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/

[1] https://fly.io/blog/sandboxing-and-workload-isolation/

> Firecracker [0], likely to be more, not less, secure than Isolates [1]

This is debatable. It's true that V8 is a much larger attack surface than Firecracker, therefore likely to have more security bugs than Firecracker itself. However, Firecracker runs attacker-provided native code directly on hardware, which means that hardware itself becomes an attack surface, one that is quite wide, not fully documented, and very hard to patch if problems arise. It's much easier to work around hardware bugs when you're working from JS / Wasm and can control the code generation.

Ultimately I don't think you can really say one or the other model is more or less secure.

(Disclosure: I'm the tech lead for Cloudflare Workers so I am obviously biased here.)

Thanks Kenton.

> Firecracker runs attacker-provided native code directly on hardware, which means that hardware itself becomes an attack surface, one that is quite wide, not fully documented, and very hard to patch if problems arise. It's much easier to work around hardware bugs...

I see your point. I mean, Google wouldn't put as much effort as they are on gVisor if KVMs were the best possible answer.

To be fair, gVisor also runs native code directly on hardware. Any modern VM-based system is still depending on the CPU to enforce boundaries. A big CPU bug could ruin that at any time. (Spectre has been pretty bad, but not quite a showstopper...)

They can always get acquired by Amazon first.

It wouldn't surprise me if that's the eventual end goal. Amazon is looking for good Rust talent too from what I've read.

That’s the goal of almost all startups. Your chances of being acquired by a FAANG company are millions of times greater than going IPO. It is almost always the exit strategy.

They compete much more with Cloudflare Workers, not Lambda. So much so that Deno Deploy is worker API compatible

Workers is now a much capable platform. It supports eventual KV storage, caching large files, longer runtimes (30m+), WebSockets, WASM-executables, and distributed mail-boxes àla Erlang.

Lambda integrates with existing AWS services, whilst Cloudflare invents newer services to go along with the serverless-first paradigm. Different strategies but they do compete with each other.