<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>AReallyGoodName</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve found Lambda to be really ridiculously fucking cheap. We moved image resizing onto it and saved thousands a month.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t compare the cost of Lambda per 100ms to the cost of a virtual machine per month since Lambda only charges as you use it. You&amp;#x27;d have to have the CPU pegged at 100% usage to make that a fair comparison. Mind you even if you took the cost of Lambda per 100ms and multiplied that out for a monthly cost it&amp;#x27;s still about the same as an EC2 instance of the same capacity. (Eg. if I had a 1GB Lambda running for a total of 1 month compute time in the uswest2 region it&amp;#x27;d cost $32).&lt;p&gt;Oh and the cost of API gateway is $3.50 per million requests and the bandwidth cost is completely negligible for us (we redirect to the resized image hosted on S3, fronted by cloudfront). We get 3 million image resizing requests a day. That&amp;#x27;s over 30 per second. It would take a lot of VMs to handle that (image resizing isn&amp;#x27;t trivial). Or we could just pay the whole $11.50.&lt;p&gt;I have to ask have you done the math? Lambda beats everything in cost except for some funky solutions using unreliable and less scalable lowendbox.com services.</text><parent_chain><item><author>SwellJoe</author><text>AWS Lambda is cool and all, but aren&amp;#x27;t people doing the math on this? Lambda seems like a &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; expensive way to deliver almost anything. Likewise, the AWS API Gateway is expensive, but at least provides some additional capabilities. Lambda seems like its profitable niche would be very small; limited computing environment, very high cost (relative to almost every other way to host an API), and having to learn a whole bunch of new APIs and processes to make it all spin.&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something?</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/preview-the-python-serverless-microframework-for-aws/?sc_channel=sm&amp;sc_campaign=launch_sdk_tools_4a8efa18&amp;sc_publisher=tw_go&amp;sc_content=Python_Microframework&amp;sc_country=global&amp;sc_geo=global&amp;adbsc=social_launches_20160711_63715856&amp;adbid=752600622390587393&amp;adbpl=tw&amp;adbpr=66780587</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>I think the appeal of Lambda is that most services get zero-to-low usage, and so something which is &amp;quot;pay only for usage&amp;quot; may be a net win over dedicated computing resources if you use it for the right parts.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve had a number of startup ideas that went nowhere, and it would&amp;#x27;ve been handy to test &amp;amp; demo them without springing for the full $17&amp;#x2F;month for an EC2 t2.micro instance.  Usually they have some key aspect that&amp;#x27;s prevented me from running them on Lambda (eg. you can&amp;#x27;t exactly run a hacked Node.js binary on Lambda, and sending push notifications from it requires going through SNS and adopting its API), but if I could run arbitrary code &amp;amp; third-party packages and pay for only the computing time I use, it&amp;#x27;s an attractive proposition.&lt;p&gt;In general you use AWS for convenience anyway - if you&amp;#x27;re concerned about minimizing costs, you can sometimes get 10x price&amp;#x2F;performance ratios by moving to dedicated hosting.</text><parent_chain><item><author>SwellJoe</author><text>AWS Lambda is cool and all, but aren&amp;#x27;t people doing the math on this? Lambda seems like a &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; expensive way to deliver almost anything. Likewise, the AWS API Gateway is expensive, but at least provides some additional capabilities. Lambda seems like its profitable niche would be very small; limited computing environment, very high cost (relative to almost every other way to host an API), and having to learn a whole bunch of new APIs and processes to make it all spin.&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something?</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/preview-the-python-serverless-microframework-for-aws/?sc_channel=sm&amp;sc_campaign=launch_sdk_tools_4a8efa18&amp;sc_publisher=tw_go&amp;sc_content=Python_Microframework&amp;sc_country=global&amp;sc_geo=global&amp;adbsc=social_launches_20160711_63715856&amp;adbid=752600622390587393&amp;adbpl=tw&amp;adbpr=66780587</url></story>