Which does beg the question of why does lambda compute have to cost more per unit of work, however you define it. I may be wrong, but I would think that, from a cloud provider point of view, it is actually more efficient at resources and energy utilization, so is it just because of the convenience? - ThreadSky

alessandronyc.bsky.social • 65 days ago

Which does beg the question of why does lambda compute have to cost more per unit of work, however you define it. I may be wrong, but I would think that, from a cloud provider point of view, it is actually more efficient at resources and energy utilization, so is it just because of the convenience?

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ogghead.bsky.social•65 days ago

Serverless ability to scale to 0 can lead to more efficient resource usage on bursty workloads where servers might otherwise be idling a lot. But there is compute overhead (for the cloud provider) in spinning up a container/microVM to run your workload, so per “unit of compute” it is more costly.

alessandronyc.bsky.social•65 days ago

right, and I was wondering how much this overhead really costs anymore, with firecracker and all the other things that have been built in the last 10 years of lambda.

theburningmonk.com•65 days ago

Two things:

1. it doesn't necessarily cost more per unit of work. I have seen large EC2 clusters avg sub 5% CPU, if you move those workloads to Lambda, cost per unit of work would be lower because you carry less waste.

theburningmonk.com•65 days ago

2. you get a lot of things out-of-the-box, e.g.
* multi-az redundancy
* load balancing across AZs
* large pool of capacity to scale into on-demand (that you're not paying for when you're not using)
* OS patching on the host
* network security on the host
* patching for managed runtimes

theburningmonk.com•65 days ago

* retries & DLQ for async invocations
* ESM for polling event sources
* blue-green deployment

there're probably others, but those are things I no longer have to worry about and AWS is taking care of for me

alessandronyc.bsky.social•65 days ago

Absolutely, and I 100% agree. I absolutely love it. But what I was questioning wasn’t if it’s better for me (it is), what I was wondering was: if it is better for the cloud provider as well (and I suspect it is), why not incentivizing its use more, by reducing its cost?

alessandronyc.bsky.social•65 days ago

When I read “oh well that’s expensive to run on lambda, so I will use a bunch of ec2 (or containers) at 30% utilization” I wonder for who it’s better to allocate those resources inefficiently. It seems it is for the customer, because of how pricing is structured, but does it need to be this way?

theburningmonk.com•65 days ago

I find that, most of the time people think Lambda is gonna be expensive for their workload, but they haven't actually done the calculation, probably because they don't know their traffic pattern.

theburningmonk.com•65 days ago

I'd argue they already incentivize the use of Lambda by making it very cheap. Not to mention a free tier that doesn't expire after one year of account opening.

AFAIK Lambda is a loss leader and AWS doesn't make money from the Lambda service

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