If the author sees this: I'd be interested in a more generalized example of using lambda instead of ec2. What kind of savings do you generally get, and for what level of effort?
The cost savings are not the main advantage of AWS Lambda compared to EC2 (AWS recently announced EC2 will bill on a per second basis and a minimum of 1 minute). Instead, I'd argue that the programming interface, managed operations, and scalability are what makes it a better tool for these types of tasks! I'm looking into running other more general computations on Lambda right now as part of my PhD! (stay tuned for more soon). Until then, check out ExCamera (https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi17/technical-sessions/...) and PyWren (https://github.com/pywren/pywren).
Awesome, thanks for the insight! Good luck on your PhD.
Impressive job for a six hour video!
> In total, the face recognition and montage creation took less than 5 minutes and cost about $8!