I'm curious why you'd think a serverless solution would be more expensive than traditional instances once you've exceeded the free tier limits. With Lambda, you are only charged based on the number of requests and their duration. The pricing model includes 1M requests and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time for free every month. Thereafter, its $0.20 per 1M requests. Seems very cost-effective when compared to traditional server-based solutions.
the example in the blog seems fairly straightforward -- low cost solution with minimal operations. not sure why anyone would want to replace that with instances, unless they enjoy maintaining and patching large surface areas (or has an ops team that does it for them)
There are more costs to Serverless than just CPU and RAM — and for many users, the additional cost categories of API Requests, Storage and Networking will be the major cost drivers.
Part of the problem is that people are conflating the application notion of a server which is about software — with the infrastructure notion of a server which is about instances and/or heavyweight proper VMs.
Over the same 30-day period, the Alexa skills have invoked the related AWS Lambda functions over 1M times.All the Lambda functions share the same AWS account and each function is allocated 512MB of memory and configured with a 7 second timeout.
Don’t you dare inflict the software, the service, the product onto your customers until you have forced your own employees to use it to get their work done, until you’ve bet your own company, your own employees’ success, on its quality. Put your money where your mouth is. Eat your own dog food.
Fundamentally, versioned Lambda code doesn’t feel like it belongs in CloudFormation. In the end, the set of versions of a Lambda function is probably going to look like a replica of your repository history.