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AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

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Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#141

Post by CapriciousCptl »

mrits wrote: post #96
munns wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that none of the rest of your infrastructure is there, and that APIs represent just a non-majority part of Lambda workloads.

To be clear, you're acknowledging Cloudflare has a much better pricing model but just not as many other services yet?

They're not easily comparable (I tried using Cloudflare Workers before going back to AWS). Lambda@Edge runs Node or Python. Cloudflare Workers runs V8 with "worker isolates" which has a few more caveats, an imperfect but improving dev experience, and doesn't work with a lot of npm packages.

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#142

Post by ashtonkem »

narag wrote: post #87
jlouis wrote: post #6

Necessary change. Now writing stuff in fast languages suddenly matter in cost, changing the landscape of when these solutions might become viable for a chase.

I've been here for a while resisting the temptation to write a sarcastic comment. Speed has been the opposite of what matters for decades. Every change is always trading speed for something else. And suddenly some offer by Amazon is going to change that? Seems unlikely.

Speed has never not mattered; whoever told you that hand waved over a ton of nuance and did you a disservice. The reality is that for a lot of work loads an increase in speed is not worth the tradeoff (key word) of increased maintenance burden.

All else being equal, faster services are cheaper to run. Faster services can service more requests per compute/memory resource, which means you don't have to buy as many servers/containers/whatever. This is particularly important if you're being billed by the ms, which is the context we're talking about here.

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#143

Post by ashtonkem »

Scarbutt wrote: post #70
camhart wrote: post #5

I've learned that AWS pricing tends to improve over time, and I appreciate it. I just recently switched from a startup offering authorization to AWS Cognito because the startup kept raising their price(s). It's nice to see this drop, though I'm sure Amazon does it due to competition as well.

I just recently switched from a startup offering authorization to AWS Cognito because the startup kept raising their price(s). Maybe because they know Cognito is horrible? ;) OTOH, I have never seen DynamoDB prices decreasing.

On demand pricing dropped our DynamoDB cost by ~20%.

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#144

Post by freeqaz »

koolba wrote: post #59
jlouis wrote: post #6

Necessary change. Now writing stuff in fast languages suddenly matter in cost, changing the landscape of when these solutions might become viable for a chase.

And you can pick any language you'd like as it supports arbitrary containers now too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25267182

This should be at the top of this thread! This is huge and fixes my #1 gripe with Lambda -- that managing dependencies is "non-standard" and you can't use tools like Docker. Plus, the 250MB limit is brutal.

This is really, really exciting!

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#145

Post by stefano »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #97
valbaca wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the research I did, here's how languages stack up in Lambda runtime (lowest first): 1. Python & JS 2. Go 3. C# & Java I couldn't find any data on Rust. The understanding at the time was that Python & JS runtimes are built-in, so the interpreter is "already running" Go is the fastest of compiled languages, but just can't beat the built-in runtimes. C# and Java were poorest as they're spinning up a larger runtime…

I’m not sure I’m interested in a hello world benchmark if it takes Python 5 seconds to import its dependencies in the real world.

This is very true. Just importing Django + Django Rest Framework + some other minor libraries in Google App Engine (standard) leads to painfully slow response times when a new instance spins up. Like, more than 10s to spin up an instance. Although App Engine seems to be 3-4 times slower than my desktop computer from 2014 on this particular task. I wonder if AWS lambda is better.

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#146

Post by pdelgallego »

bpodgursky wrote: post #61
Supermancho wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So this is a pretty good advancement for cost savings. For some people. Those cost savings are made up somewhere else. Ultimately, Amazon is not a loss leader.

If Amazon reduces costs behind the scenes, they can maintain the same revenue while lowering prices for everyone, by helping people deploy previously cost-prohibitive infrastructure. (ie, if people now use 1.5x as many Lambdas, they can lower costs by 1/3, and everyone wins).

The Jevons paradox applies to compute. In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand. The more efficient (or cheaper) compute gets the more uses we find for it, rising the consumption of it.

People think about pricing as a zero sum game. In reality, there are very few things in the world that are zero sum games.

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#147

Post by safog »

DenisM wrote: post #63
irrational wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they are doing it to be nice to consumers. I think they are doing it to cost less than competitors.

FWIW I was informed by an AWS employee that their internal philosophy is to keep pricing at cost+ levels, which is a strategic play - it forces the operations to remain lean and discourages many competitors from trying to wedge themselves into the cost-price gap. Fat profit margins attract competition, this is what happened when Oracle/Unix combo were chewed up by Microsoft Windows/SQL from the bottom, and then Linux…

"Your margin is my opportunity."

- Jeff Bezos

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#148

Post by daxfohl »

munns wrote: post #134
jthomerson wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chris, while I've seen the change in my accounts on regular Lambda, I don't yet see it on Lambda@Edge. I think Lambda@Edge is the place where we'd benefit from this change the most, because many L@E scenarios take single-digit milliseconds, and the cost of L@E is 3x regular Lambda. Any word on whether we'll also see this change on L@E billing?

Yes, to be clear this change was just for Lambda. L@E is honestly a completely different service run by a different part of AWS that just happens to share parts of our core worker platform. I am not 100% aware of when they might adjust their own pricing on this, but also couldn't share any roadmap here (sorry).

How does that even work? Lambda seems like a challenge even with the entirety of the datacenter resources to work with. Running it in constrained edge environments with a VM per function seems like black magic.

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#149

Post by archgoon »

staticassertion wrote: post #60
alpha_squared wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a process takes that long, lambda would be a poor architectural choice.

My lambdas run for 15 minutes. I feel that they're still a great choice :)

Huh... that's the limit of lambda functions, are you doing some sort of work in 15 minute chunks?

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#150

Post by hlieberman »

munns wrote: post #56
catchmeifyoucan wrote: post #2

For reference - Lambda functions used to billed at 100ms intervals. My Node.Js function usually only takes 37-40ms to run. So this is a pretty good advancement for cost savings.

Awesome! That was the idea here. Lots of sub 100ms workloads and we really want you to be able to pay for what you use. - Chris, Serverless@AWS

Wait, are you Chris Munns from Music2Go? If so, massively small world. My email is username @setec.io; would love to hear from you.

-Harlan, the ex-intern

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