Instant scale with AWS Lambda (2017)

I love AWS because it offers immediate solutions at your fingertips, however, I am skeptical of Lambda&#x27;s ubiquity.<p>Too many times have I drank the Kool-Aid for `someManagedAWSService` and then been surprised by the resultant costs. For example, be very careful when using things like DynamoDB and Lambda. One can easily use DynamoDB incorrectly and end up wasting lots of money. Similarly, I think it would be very easy to adopt some sort of &quot;replace everything with Lambda&quot; approach which would be a misplaced effort as well. Lambda has a specific time and place, it is not a silver bullet.

The best use case of Lambda for us is Scheduled tasks and stupid administrative tasks that you would not like to put it in your &#x2F;etc&#x2F;crontab

I appreciate that AWS Lambda has been a win for various people but this case study doesn&#x27;t really mention what they tried to do with scaling. Whilst 0 to 100k sounds good, they also had seemingly chosen just one scaling solution of a big instance - several smaller instances behind a load balancer which scale up&#x2F;down would surely have served the same outcome?<p>Lambda has been sold on &quot;saving costs&quot; but what seems to be often neglected is the developer time spent re-jigging into a &quot;serverless&quot; model. Developer resources are far, far more expensive than mere EC2 instances.

Lambda has a long way to go, it&#x27;s a promising product but if you want to develop anything for it, it&#x27;s a bit painful and archaic.<p>I&#x27;ve had issues with the temp memory. It is completely unreliable, you have to store files when processing in &#x2F;tmp&#x2F; and for whatever reason, reading from this results is patchy. I had to resort to storing every file I process in the RAM.<p>The tooling is only just taking off now, 6 months ago simulation was painful, at least there is AWS SAM now and docker support.<p>However despite the pain, it&#x27;s giving me a solution for scalable video encoding that is very cost competitive and I don&#x27;t have to worry about submitting jobs and monitoring resources.