Hacker News Reader

Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

If you have to use beefy lambda instances with multi-threaded workloads? I don't think lambda is the right tool for the job there. I'm not saying it has no value - but that's the opposite of playing to its strengths.

View on HN

It all depends, I think. I once used multi-threading to speed up the initialization of a Lambda which was just a "port" of a beefy rest service. It was ported to cut costs and for fault isolation. I managed to gain 2-3 seconds of initialization time, but it was something.

A Lambda deployment has the advantage that no one needs to manage it, and faults are isolated between clients. You could argue that if you need these properties your engineering organization has deeper flaws, and you'd be right, but in many companies engineers need to make do with what they get.

> A Lambda deployment has the advantage that no one needs to manage it

I assure you that somebody does need to manage it, and if nobody is you are going to eventually hit the wall at speed.

I've been called into SEV-1 issues where a Lambda-based web app spontaneously disappeared. (Seasoned AWS heads can probably make a guess as to why.)

Sure, I was perhaps too hyperbolic. In my case, the advantage was specifically fault isolation for a multi-tenant, low traffic, demanding workload that was traditionally deployed as a physical service.

"I assure you that somebody does need to manage it"

You can always tell who has had to live with non-trivial serverless systems in Prod and who is just parroting the marketing copy.

Let's keep it civilized please. I cited a specific example from my experience, I'm not parroting anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com