
Ask HN: DO You Use AWS Lambda? Why? Why Not? - siscia
Folks,<p>this night I dream an architecture to build a &quot;clone&quot; of AWS Lambda.<p>The more I think about the more it seems reasonable.<p>Before to start coding and stuff, I would like to know if you guys are using AWS Lambda, what you like of the service and what you dislike.<p>What would it be your perfect Lambda ?<p>Thanks :)
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julsimon
Hi everyone,

I'm a Technical Evangelist at Amazon Web Services.

Here are some videos from re:Invent 2015 on AWS Lambda : technology, use
cases, customer stories. I hope you find them useful :)

@julsimon

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-lambda-sessions-
at-...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-lambda-sessions-at-
reinvent-2015-wrap-up/)

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smt88
Please please please please support a sane version of Node (something released
less than 9 years ago would be nice...)

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JakaJancar
It should run containers and not be so "PaaS-y".

Large burstiness would also be amazing.

Imagine running Spark where a hundred workers are allocated for 30 seconds. It
makes it possible to build services like BigQuery.

~~~
siscia
Great suggestion, I do agree with everything you said :)

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SkyRocknRoll
Still lambda dont have vpc support. That means if you want update a database
row from lambda function in you ec2 machine then the db port should be open to
public. So we are waiting for vpc support.

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martijnvdgrift
VPC Support is announced, see: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-lambda-
update-python-vp...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-lambda-update-
python-vpc-increased-function-duration-scheduling-and-more/)

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patman_h
They announced that support was _on its way_ , but they missed the "end of
2015" release estimate. This seems to be the most up-to-date thread on their
support forums (we're following along closely!):
[https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=178841&st...](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=178841&start=25&tstart=0)

~~~
martijnvdgrift
Now available!

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-access-resources-in-
a-v...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-access-resources-in-a-vpc-from-
your-lambda-
functions/?sc_channel=sm&sc_campaign=launches_2016&sc_publisher=fb_ln&sc_content=lambda_access_vpc&sc_country=global&sc_geo=global&sc_category=lambda&adbsc=social_launches_20160212_58209126&adbid=945092382194794&adbpl=fb&adbpr=153063591397681)

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hijinks
DevOps here.

I use Lambda for a lot of aws backup jobs that boto can do. For example

* RDS hourly snapshots * EBS daily snapshots * checking contents of s3 buckets

Works great for that type work for me as long as the job doesn't run for more
then 300 seconds.

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dgreensp
I was looking into it as a scalable solution for the backend of an app, but I
was turned off by reports of high latency (up to a couple seconds) and the
initially low limits for the service (they've been upped, but I think it was
60 second timeout per lambda and max 100 concurrent lambdas across an entire
account; now it's 300 seconds and 1024 concurrent processes).

Lambda seems designed for internal trusted use for offline or background data
processing, not for writing a public API endpoint.

~~~
nkristoffersen
AWS provides an API gateway service!
[http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/apigateway/](http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/apigateway/)

Might fit your needs better than Lambda.

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edem
I am curious about the answers you will get. I'm on the other side of the
pipeline: I'm planning to use a Lambda and I'm eager to hear why it is good
and why it is not.

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SingAlong
At work, we invoke an async Lambda function to make a _lot_ of concurrent
requests to different APIs for one input. In short: a batch.

Lambda passes the data to another component on AWS to be processed.

The input sources for data range from APIs calls on Lambda, data from
partners, data from legacy components, etc. So we split our data
sourcing/fetching and data processing. They all flow into the same funnel
(component) to be processed.

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patman_h
We've hooked up lambda to boot "on-demand" Celery
([http://www.celeryproject.org/](http://www.celeryproject.org/)) workers.
Allows us to scale up workers (for async task processing, etc.) in ~1-3
seconds vs the ~3-5 minutes it takes to boot EC2 instances for extra capacity.

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tylerpachal
Use Lambda + PhantomJS + D3 to make a lot of visualizations that are saved as
images. It works well but the development was a bit of a pain, and finding a
PhantomJS binary that was compatible with Amazon's flavour of linux took a
little while.

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mojoe
I use lambda in a pipeline that spins up ec2 instances using a cloudformation
template. The lambda is kicked off by an SNS message sent by a GUI on a
dedicated server, and also checks an SQS queue.

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collyw
I don't use it, as I have no real idea of what it is for, and if I have any
use cases where it would be suitable.

Anyone got a one or two line description of the sort of problems it would be
good at solving?

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icebraining
It's a hosted evented framework. You just write stateless functions and
configure the service to call them in response to certain events (such as HTTP
requests), without worrying about the servers where they run.

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sirmiller
Running a large scale analytics tracking backend for a game on AWS (written in
swift, needs some hacks). About 5 million requests/hour.

Pro: \- Dirt cheap (pay only what you need) \- Scales fast and large \- Just
works

Cons: \- Getting swift to run is very hacky

Considering to replace the game backend (scala on ec2) with Swift on Lambda
(plus API gateway)

ps: Lambdas do run in containers/instances that get reused ... unless they are
idle for too long.

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scprodigy
Then how different containers get isolated from each other?

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nkristoffersen
I use Lambda for creating thumbnails of user-submitted images. Works great!

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mchahn
It seems to me that lambda is made possible by the large infrastructure and
wide variety of services that AWS provides. I don't see how you could recreate
that in a small-company environment.

