Thanks for sharing. This is a perfect example which proves lambda/serverless/cf worker are snake oils.
If under 10 million requests per month, serverless will be cheaper and safer
Else if under 1 billion request per month, managed VPS will be cheaper
If over hundred of billions of requests per month, anything else than on premise is probably an error.
Then you have grey areas where you need to process.
But for most small project, you cannot beat the lambda prices. Especially if you expect bursts.
it sounds lot cooler to say that " i made geolocation service using serverless/lamba" than "i made geolocation service using boring monolithic technology". where the former takes 150 hours to get it right and painful to add/manage features. where the later is very easy to maintain and very predictable priced.
In my last gig, we ran plenty of services that would never need to scale and would likely never hit the point where Lambda became too expensive. Low-utilization services (Example for order submit, because we only ever got a couple hundred orders per day), Cron-type jobs (Admins could use Cloudwatch to monitor), Temporary fan-outs using queues. Anything that won't ever hit the millions-per-day level is a good candidate for something along these lines. Most of those services cost <$5/month.
[1] https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-thi...
32 million requests can be easily served with $50/month heroku node.
What I want to hear is how you argue serverless is “snake oil” when evidence says it’s massively cheaper even at scale. Less than $1/mo to serve 141m requests. How is that snake oil when even you say an equivalent “serverfull” solution costs 50x more?
1. You are saving $49 month by spending 250+ hours engineering hours to structure the application which is near impossible to extend/maintain.
2. The $49/month subsidy (free tier) you are getting is temporary and will eventually go away (think about google maps api price change).
3. 50x cost for serverfull solution is not a right number. lets say you have to handle 500M requests per month (around 200 QPS) the 50x becomes .000X.
4. If there is any sudden spike to popularity, you are screwed. you will end up paying several thousand $ per month.
I think I’ve heard enough to say you have no idea what you’re talking about and this conversation has become pointless.