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AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

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Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#191

Post by ctvo »

gwerbret wrote: post #165
munns wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No to be clear I'm saying you are comparing things that are way more different than our friends at Cloudflare would like you to think. They aren't brought up in any of the convos I have with customers.

> No to be clear I'm saying you are comparing things that are way more different than our friends at Cloudflare would like you to think. Care to expand on that? What exactly do you mean by "things are way more different"?

Last I looked Cloudflare Workers had different limits and constraints:

https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits

It's a quick Google. 128MB max memory, 6 concurrent out going connections max, 1MB code size limit. The use case here is a subset of what AWS Lambda can handle. The supported languages also differ (only things that have a JS / wasm conversion for Cloudflare Workers).

I haven't looked deeply, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand there's also restrictions on the built-in APIs available [1] and npm packages supported for NodeJS.

I would assume some of the above contributes to the price difference.

1 - https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/web-s...

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#193

Post by landerwust »

koluna wrote: post #184
landerwust wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your lambda function can be a container

Why would you want to put it in Lambda then when there are better options?

There is no better option for temporally sparse compute. If your job can run all the time there is no benefit to these systems, but if it wastes money by being provisioned all the time when not in use, there is no alternative.

Lambda is neither "worse" nor "better" in any general sense. It's just another option that might apply given a particular scenario, and one that got significantly cheaper today.

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#194

Post by ignoramous »

jrd259 wrote: post #178
ignoramous wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you're telling us that Lambda's prices are justifiably higher because of the strong vendor lock-in? AWS is starting to sound more like Oracle. Ironic. :) Besides the fact that Cloudflare's part of the Bandwidth Alliance with GCP and other infrastructure providers from which AWS is conspicuously absent, Cloudflare's also slowly but surely building a portfolio of cloud services.

This reply is in bad faith. He did not attempt to "justify" the pricing with "vendor lock-in". Indeed, the prices went down, not up.

Lambda's pricing is indeed higher than Cloudflare Workers for sub 50ms workloads (that fit 128MB RAM).

Cloudflare's alliance with other infrastructure providers mean Cloudflare's platform isn't really limited to "API" workloads. This is discounting the fact that Cloudflare recently announced Workers Unlimited for workloads that need to run longer (upto 30mins) though then they do charge for bandwidth.

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#195

Post by blantonl »

koluna wrote: post #179

All fine and dandy, until it is not. Lambda = massive vendor lock-in, which means once you start depending on it, it’ll be hard to rip it out of your system and replace with someone else. My startup used to heavily rely on Lambda and frankly I wish we never did - so much AWS-specific complexity that is just not worth the trouble. Their own representative admits it[0]. We moved everything to containerized workflows an…

I'm pretty sure we've reached an inflection point with some "technical architects" where they spend more time worrying about vendor lock and doing technical gymnastics to reach portability nirvana instead of just shipping decent code and products that make money.

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#196

Post by eins1234 »

CapriciousCptl wrote: post #141
mrits wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What would be really useful for my use case (running browser tests on a schedule) is if Cloudflare workers actually supported running full headless chromium automation in addition to just V8 isolates. Right now I'm using puppeteer/playwright + Lambda, but would love to have more options.

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#197

Post by cestith »

colechristensen wrote: post #83
SamBam wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this change increase the likelihood of that happening?

Before the 100x courser granularity would hide a lot more variation if your lambdas were quick.

It would be a surprise of less savings, but it would still be a savings on the tail with the smaller granularity. Perhaps Keep your old budgets for a while and be glad at the surprise discount.

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#198

Post by koluna »

blantonl wrote: post #195
koluna wrote: post #179

All fine and dandy, until it is not. Lambda = massive vendor lock-in, which means once you start depending on it, it’ll be hard to rip it out of your system and replace with someone else. My startup used to heavily rely on Lambda and frankly I wish we never did - so much AWS-specific complexity that is just not worth the trouble. Their own representative admits it[0]. We moved everything to containerized workflows an…

I'm pretty sure we've reached an inflection point with some "technical architects" where they spend more time worrying about vendor lock and doing technical gymnastics to reach portability nirvana instead of just shipping decent code and products that make money.

YMMV, of course. The problem with lock-in is that you start designing code that is for a given vendor, AWS in this case. Once you find that the vendor either is prohibitive cost or functionality-wise, you will have to spend your development resources untangling the mess rather than shipping value.

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#199

Post by sushshshsh »

acer4666 wrote: post #180
gwerbret wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No to be clear I'm saying you are comparing things that are way more different than our friends at Cloudflare would like you to think. Care to expand on that? What exactly do you mean by "things are way more different"?

This is pretty standard AWS marketing spiel. They make vague assertions of "ah but you're not considering the big picture...." with no details

Based. "That's just an edge case. Our customers love this service!"

It's like going to a restaurant that uses bottled water instead of tap water, and they dont provide an answer as to what the benefits of bottled water are

Re: AWS Lambda pricing now per ms

#200

Post by koluna »

munns wrote: post #190
koluna wrote: post #179

All fine and dandy, until it is not. Lambda = massive vendor lock-in, which means once you start depending on it, it’ll be hard to rip it out of your system and replace with someone else. My startup used to heavily rely on Lambda and frankly I wish we never did - so much AWS-specific complexity that is just not worth the trouble. Their own representative admits it[0]. We moved everything to containerized workflows an…

That is not at all what my words say and I won't reply to that thread which was started by a former competitor to troll this convo today. The perceived lock-in is really no different than consuming other technologies. You make a trade-off on what you want to manage vs. handoff to a managed service. For many customers the benefits are well worth it. It's fine that Lambda wasn't for you, but you aren't being clear here…

Cost, lack of debugging capabilities, terrible developer tools, cryptic documentation that misses some key scenarios, I can go on. Now, I get it, you’re at AWS so you would never openly and bluntly come out and say that what you -really- want is to lock in your users, because that brings AWS money. But that’s the reality. See my earlier comment as to why it made sense for our company to move away from Lambda.
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