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Comment by pramodliv1 | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone used IronWorker in production? It seems to be more flexible than AWS Lambda. http://blog.iron.io/2015/01/aws-lambda-vs-ironworker.html

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Here are a few updated differences. disclosure I work for Iron.io

Lambda: node, java

IronWorker: node, ruby, python, php, java, binaries, .NET, go (binaries), and more (specific language runtime versions available)

Lambda: allows 500mb of local disk space to persist your task

IronWorker: 10 gb of local disk space available

Lambda: only current version of code

IronWorker: versions all uploads and allows you to revert

Lambda: no built in scheduler

IronWorker: a flexible scheduler out of the box to run tasks

Lambda: maximum execution time 60 seconds

IronWorker:maximum execution time 1 hour (customizable up to 24 hours for dedicated users)

Lambda: 100 maximum concurrent request. (The maximum can be higher, can someone point me to the absolute maximum if it exist?)

IronWorker: concurrency maximum can go much higher as needed (250 for a production plan). You can also limit concurrency per IronWorker, aka set a worker to only run up to 50 concurrent tasks. (useful if you have bottlenecks)

Lambda: 90 inactive code retention period

IronWorker: no limit to inactive code retention period

Lambda: available on aws

IronWorker: choose your cloud provider: AWS, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, private clouds, and more.

We've also enabled users to pause the execution of their task queue incase they need to patch or revise their worker code.

supporting your own docker images

http://blog.iron.io/2015/06/no-lock-in-thanks-to-docker.html

http://blog.iron.io/2015/05/full-docker-support-for-ironwork...

We’ve been doing some very neat stuff with our local docker development workflow

https://medium.com/@treeder/why-and-how-to-use-docker-for-de...

edits* formatting

Overall we are are glad Lambda is validating workflows around eventable compute services. It's an experience we've been innovating for some time now.

Thanks for the comparison. Regarding Lambda maximum concurrency, I am currently configured for a limit of 20,000 concurrent invokes so perhaps your figure of 100 is not the maximum but simply the default maximum?

Yes, default is 100: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html

Curious: Was it a lot of back-and-forth with support to lift the limits?

It looks like your pricing starts at $49 / month. Do you offer on demand, or cost per task, similar to what amazon lamdba offers? I have some tasks that I'd love to try iron worker for, but $49 / mo for a side project is more than I'm willing to spend.

There's a free tier which you may be interested in: http://www.iron.io/pricing#worker

There's then pay-per-second pricing if you go outside of your plan (which I assume covers the free tier, but I don't know) [edit - if you have this enabled, you don't have to]

> Compute hours that exceed the rated plan will be billed at a rate of $0.075/hr. The free plan provides 10 hours/mo.

Edit 2 - Disclaimer, I don't work for them, just been looking at their pricing pages a lot.

Man, I'm full of edits today :|

Thank you, that's a lot closer to what I am looking for. Note to iron.io - you should make the free plan a lot clearer. I still can't find the details for it, and this is exactly what I am looking for.

If your cloud provider is AWS how do you make so many concurrent requests with monthly pricing. It seems the pricing would incentivise you to use a single machine for all the requests.

I think you might find http://webtask.io interesting for similar use-cases where the full spectrum of http methods are supported.

The premise is a sort of RPC service running arbitrary javascript code within the life-cycle of a request. The huge benefit here is the ability to securely expose secrets to webtask code, allowing you to do things like connect to a database, stripe, 3rd parti api, etc.

Let me know if you have any questions on this model.

The IronWorker doesn't seem to fulfill the same promise of simplicity that Lambda does. It's talking about scheduling and creating docker instances where Lambda says "just give us your code".

Docker support is a new feature to enable more complex jobs where you need to control the entire stack, for instance, maybe you need imagemagick installed on the core machine, or ghostscript. IronWorker can support that. It also allows you to test your workers locally before uploading: http://blog.iron.io/2015/03/the-new-ironworker-development-w....

That said, you don't need to think about Docker if you don't want to and an IronWorker can be a few lines of code too, for example:

https://github.com/iron-io/dockerworker/blob/master/ruby/hel...

Or node: https://github.com/iron-io/dockerworker/blob/master/node/hel...

Thanks for posting those, their splash page gave me the feeling that you were always responsible for the docker mental overhead.

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