It's admittedly a simplification and a best case. For AWS Lambda, the price is in GB-seconds, and the amount of CPU available to your function is itself a function of the memory allocated.

The price is $0.0000166667 for every GB-second on X86. So it looks like I've also misplaced a decimal. It's $0.20 per 1M requests with 1GB of memory.

Lambdas can be sized from 128MB to 10GB, and pricing depends on the resources allotted.

Ultimately, this pricing just represents the compute time for a function to complete. That function can do whatever it wants.

There are additional costs to put an API Gateway in front of it, for instance, to make it a publicly accessible API.

Lambda function endpoints[1] are a replacement for some use cases.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-aws-lambda-funct...

I'm not day to day on cloud stuff, haven't been in a while, that's why I'm asking this, not intended to be passive-aggressive:

So if I had a "hello world" function, that basically just returned a constant JSON payload...I'm seriously looking at a pittance, pennies for millions of requests? I.e. $0.20?

No. You would also have to pay for memory usage and bandwidth.

Millions of requests for a static file is easily done on a dedicated server in a few seconds if the file is small. $0.2 per request is very expensive.

To put things in to perspective: If you buy a very cheap new server for $1K, then you would be able to handle small static requests worth thousands for dollars each day according to AWS pricing. That's a nice return on investment!

yes.

It's not $0.20 per 1M 1 second request with 1G memory. It's $16.87, and $33.53 for the 2 seconds you mentioned in your parent post.

It's $0.20 per request, without memory.

Also s3 costs for storing the lambda function code, dependencies and that functions past versions.