How we saved over $1k by building CloudForecast with Serverless and AWS Lambda

medium.com

11 pointskacy3 comments

Article like these are interesting. In our experience, API Gateway + Lambda burned through almost 5x as much money as Elastic Beanstalk, and involved so much refactoring to get around the weird limits (timeouts, recursion, etc.). Maybe if you aren't using API Gateway and you are doing something that is truly spiky. Otherwise, it's actually much more expensive at scale. Don't get me started about cold starts...

Francois here, one of the co-founder of CloudForecast.io! Serverless with Lambda fits our needs almost perfectly. We are not using API Gateway and it is truly spiky. Timeouts and recursions were a bit of challenge but nothing crazy since our use cases were fairly simple. Cold starts are definitely a pain but since it's not customer-facing we can leave with it ...

Can confirm--API Gateway pricing is nuts for many use cases.

"Think of it like a Swiss Army Knife; it does a lot, it's easy to hurt yourself with it, it can be incredibly expensive, and the instructions are all written in Swiss German."

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