Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?

Post by striglia » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 9:44 PM UTC

Prefinem wrote: post #107

chickenbane wrote: post #98

I worked on a project where the architect wanted to use Lambdas for the entire solution. This was a bad choice. Lambdas have a lot of benefits - for occasional tasks they are essentially free, the simple programming model makes them easy to understand in teams, you get Amazon's scaling and there's decent integration with caching and logging. However, especially since I had to use them for whole solution, I ran into a…

1. Use a framework for deploying your lambda functions. There are a few that will manage the API Gateway for you. 2. Don't put the Lambda inside a VPC if you want lower response times 3. Step Functions don't seem ready for prime time that I can tell. (This might have changed in the last couple of months) 4. Lambda Functions should be microservices. Small and lean. 5. There is a limit on resources for CloudFormation s…

Post by Prefinem » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 10:42 PM UTC

philliphaydon wrote: post #126

Prefinem wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

API Gateway adds around 200ms to each call for us based on our testing plus another 100ms if it’s inside a VPC. What region are you in? Our VPC has a NAT Gateway so that our Lambda functions can talk to the internet as well. I am by no means an expert and am reporting what watching the time differences between Lambda reporting and our network calls shows. Edit: this is by no means a deal breaker or anything. Just som…

(crap I just typed stuff out and pressed F5...) I haven't tried with a NAT Gateway. This is what I know. If the response is small, the request duration is small. Cloudfront > Gateway > Lambda > RDS (PostgreSQL) Response: 1k | 20ms-60ms 10k | 50ms-90ms 100k | 150ms-200ms 350k | 200ms-450ms That's a rough gauge of what I've experienced. I think the throughput on the gateway is the bottleneck.

Post by khc » Thu, Jun 29, 2017, 6:53 PM UTC

erikcw wrote: post #160

khc wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason why you can't use S3?

Sure, and that's what I do most of the time. However, if the S3 keys are larger than ~500mb, then it's not possible to process them in any way with Lambda since there isn't enough "scratch space" available in /tmp. I was suggesting EFS support merely because it would allow access to arbitrarily large amounts of "local" disk to work with...