
The Serverless Start-Up – Down with Servers - dsr12
http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/12/7/the-serverless-start-up-down-with-servers.html
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dougbarrett
I'm wondering what they're doing that they're estimating is 1 MB of data
uploaded for data in, and 10 MB of data downloaded based off the following:

| We guess that such a client uses 1000 API calls per month (that's editing
only), requires therefore 1GB of data in, and needs about 10 GB of traffic-
related data out.

I agree with Sgoettschkes regarding Heroku, I've been using it in production
for over a year without any issues at all and found it to be the lowest level
of entry for scaling apps.

For example, I just spun up some new analytics software I wrote last week in
golang and it peaks around 50k req/min, averages around 23k req/min, I'm using
4 nodes which realistically could probably handle 100k req/min without issue
since in peak it's consuming about 50% of available resources to us as it is
right now, but $100/mo is well worth it for the piece of mind, then combined
with a $20/mo percona mysql server on digitalocean that averages around 4% cpu
load, we're paying $120/mo to handle on the low end 927,360,000 http
requests/month and all I have to do is a git push and the code automatically
sets up the DB structure and DB indexes when booting the app up.

It's cool that they're using all these new technologies, but based on their
numbers for me to have this software running on their setup it could
realistically cost millions of dollars a month, and that's still removing the
costs of cloudfront and s3 since it's not relevant in my case. Maybe on paper
meshing a bunch of AWS technologies that big named companies use sounds great,
but it seems like a high price to pay for the ability to say you're using
these services.

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Sgoettschkes
If you are running on Heroku or Google App Engine, you don't have a server as
well. AWS Lambda abstracts the concept of a server even more, but yeah...

I also think the costs are pretty high. Of course I have no idea how much
traffic and requests where calculated, so I am just guessing. As cloudfront
and S3 do the heavy lifting, a cheap server or two for actual editing of the
content should be enough. And they don't need to scale on the same level as
there won't be that much changing for customers, so paying more than 10,000$
for that with 100.000 customers seems pretty high.

But I get what the idea behind it was, and it seems to work pretty good. Also
nice to have really low costs in the beginning :)

~~~
neogenix
If you would have the same setup, but with EC2 instead of lambda, you would
still have the same CloudFront pricing, so you should compare the $410 lambda
costs for 100.000 customers with the costs of some EC2 servers plus ELB. Of
course, then, you will miss the benefits of 1. no server-maintenance, 2. no
down-time or scaling issues and 3. initial startup costs - without customers.

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johannesboyne
For all the German fellows: I'll give a talk about "exactly" this topic
including a hands-on sample at the "Monster on Rails" Meetup this week in
Münster - [http://www.meetup.com/Monster-on-Rails-Web-Development-
Meetu...](http://www.meetup.com/Monster-on-Rails-Web-Development-Meetup-
Muenster/events/226965979/)

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ac360
Now, all you need is a nice open-source Framework :)
[http://www.serverless.com](http://www.serverless.com)

