I strongly recommend never using functions as a service unless you genuinely have some client edge compute requirement that absolutely cannot be solved via some other means.
Everything about running software is made more difficult this way. You might think it would make certain infrastructure aspects easier, but it just changes the semantics of the same problem. It's the same quantity of mess to clean up, but now it's in these really weird piles that are often much harder to access.
> up to 128 concurrent requests per environment
I am fairly confident I could support more capacity with a single t3a.nano instance.
These one-sided arguments come up every time there's a Lambda thread. They're useful and easily cheaper almost anywhere you have sparse compute or RAM requirements, even for heavyweight tasks like transcoding. A t3.nano meanwhile can simultaneously be overpriced ($3.50 for an idle task) and a bottleneck (30Mbit/s sustained network) in just as many places as a Lambda could be applied incorrectly.
I seem to have had the opposite experience. Using Lambda (I can't speak for many of the other FaaS platforms) is so straightforward to me that there need to be some strong arguments for hosting code/containers in my projects.
My guess is that the IaC is the special sauce that's missing; you do need to go all in with some IaC solution to make using Lambda easy, but it doesn't take a lot of it to make it slick.
Cost/compute is obviously strictly worse for FaaS, but most web workloads don't _really_ need to be optimal.
No, not really. You can attach auto scaling to it. But it doesn't scale as fast. And it's not very straightforward to scale to zero. And you have to maintain all of it yourself.
Fargate, just like ECS, doesn't natively scale to zero. You can set the minimum number of instances to zero for both, but there is no native mechanism to scale it back to one when traffic arrives. And especially not one that would hold the connection until the container is ready. Not saying it's impossible... Just not native. And it would require extra resources. So the price won't scale to zero without something like Lambda in front of it.
Isn't this a move in the other direction. Workers and traditional Lambda need to you write short lived event handlers; this is about running a standard server.
Cloudflare workers wasn’t always an 1:1 option for simple hosting (iirc) and people used to think it was more complicated than vercel etc but it has changed in recent years and right now they have made things smoother and simpler to compete with vercel and others.
Now that AWS has entered into the field as well, given that vercel and others already build on top of AWS. It will be interesting to see how this all goes.
I wonder if more og hyper scalers like say hetzner/ovh and others will also target this audience
Everything about running software is made more difficult this way. You might think it would make certain infrastructure aspects easier, but it just changes the semantics of the same problem. It's the same quantity of mess to clean up, but now it's in these really weird piles that are often much harder to access.
> up to 128 concurrent requests per environment
I am fairly confident I could support more capacity with a single t3a.nano instance.
My guess is that the IaC is the special sauce that's missing; you do need to go all in with some IaC solution to make using Lambda easy, but it doesn't take a lot of it to make it slick.
Cost/compute is obviously strictly worse for FaaS, but most web workloads don't _really_ need to be optimal.
In a container the memory/cpu is shared for all incoming requests.
Exciting times, I can’t wait for Cloudflares response.
Cloudflare workers wasn’t always an 1:1 option for simple hosting (iirc) and people used to think it was more complicated than vercel etc but it has changed in recent years and right now they have made things smoother and simpler to compete with vercel and others.
Now that AWS has entered into the field as well, given that vercel and others already build on top of AWS. It will be interesting to see how this all goes.
I wonder if more og hyper scalers like say hetzner/ovh and others will also target this audience