[HN Gopher] Handling 350k Requests for $3 using Lambda
___________________________________________________________________
Handling 350k Requests for $3 using Lambda
Author : karakanb
Score : 64 points
Date : 2020-02-28 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (levelup.gitconnected.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (levelup.gitconnected.com)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| fabioyy wrote:
| 3$ for 350k request is VERY expensive
| kenhwang wrote:
| Seriously. Something like an AWS nano instance only costs
| $4/month and can easily handle that many requests an hour with
| a slow dynamic language.
| highfrequency wrote:
| Is there no variable charge for network bandwidth?
| kenhwang wrote:
| Lambda and EC2 have the same network bandwidth charge.
| jerf wrote:
| The scary thing I saw is that while it's cool that Lambda is
| $2/month right now, which is negligible, it's $2/month for
| 900 users. If it scales linearly (and I don't know that it
| does, because I don't know exactly how the system works),
| then that means you're one good blog post somewhere about
| your extension away from being $200-$2000/month.
|
| That said, my gut says there's a good chance that since the
| author is surprised at the rate of requests, there's almost
| certainly an optimization opportunity that wouldn't even take
| much effort.
| tasogare wrote:
| Especially the author has experience with docker so
| deploying a container for his app on Digital Ocean would be
| super quick and easy. In addition, the list of
| disadvantages seems longer than the advantages, with scary
| points like the difficulty to debug things (that could
| easily takes hours to figure out if something don't run
| properly).
| habosa wrote:
| However in the case when they both get 0 requests, the Lambda
| solution costs $0 and the Micro instance still costs $4.
|
| That's a really nice advantage for starting a new project
| where you're confident in unit economics but have unknown
| scale.
| cnst wrote:
| Is it two different arguments you're posting? How's $0 on
| zero requests is a better solution when the range would be
| 0 to $2000 for what's a fixed $4 without Lambda?
|
| The $0 argument is also flowed because $4 is a fixed cost
| for unlimited $0 to $2000 solutions through hedging. If you
| have 10 solutions, what's the likelihood of all of them
| still doing $0, or at the very least below $4?
|
| The unit economics argument is likewise hard to see in
| practice, because we'd be talking quite different numbers
| on a per-unit cost with Lambda vs. without, which may
| easily make the difference between making a profit or
| taking a loss, especially if it's a lifestyle business
| we're talking about.
| abc-xyz wrote:
| Pretty sure you'd have to pay at least $3.5 if you wanted
| to expose your Lambda function using AWS API Gateway (which
| I assume most would want to do).. The author mention $1.11
| but that's for "HTTP APIs (Preview)" rather than "REST
| APIs" - in either case it wouldn't be 0. At least that's
| how I read it.. AWS pricing is such a mess with so many
| hidden fees (https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/pricing/)..
| nwsm wrote:
| If you meant for your comment to be constructive you'll need to
| expand on it.
| tuananh wrote:
| well authhor did list high cost as disadvantage.
| aeyes wrote:
| It would be a fraction of that without API gateway, not sure
| what it is needed for. I deploy directly to Lambda@Edge and it
| is an order of magnitude cheaper.
| paxys wrote:
| It may be very cheap or very expensive depending on what the
| requests are doing. There's no point making an overly
| generalized statement.
| jerven wrote:
| My experience with UniProt.org where some requests generate
| responses dynamically generated gigabytes in size. This is
| roughly 400x more expensive, assuming response equivalence.
| rumanator wrote:
| >>It may be very cheap or very expensive
|
| It is very expensive. Very. No need to ignore this fact. You
| can get a VM with 2 vCPU and 2GB of RAM for that amount with
| some cloud service providers like Hetzner.
| SlowRobotAhead wrote:
| And manage it yourself forever.
|
| I'm not saying this example isn't expensive. But you didn't
| post an apples to apples.
| lgsilver wrote:
| Agree. We consider non-cached requests costly if they extend
| beyond around $1.50 / million. That said, we do about 2-3% of
| requests non-cached. As a content network, that means that a
| million web requests can be as low as $.30 to .40. This does
| have a lot of benefit to scale, but ~$10 / million seems high.
| What stops you from putting a ttl on these and caching them for
| a couple mins. Probably would lower that number substantially.
| blantonl wrote:
| Couple points here in this specific case
|
| 1) Lambda costs were shown as actually 50 cents for all this.
| 2) API Gateway was the balance of the cost, and actually isn't
| needed in this customer's use case. Lambdas can be placed
| behind application load balancers which are significantly less
| expensive.
|
| Author also mentions other downsides such as "vendor lock-in,"
| however his lambdas were written in NodeJs and it would be
| trivial to move his code to some other NodeJs delivery
| mechanism such as Fargate or ECS cluster.
|
| The benefit here is his deployment with the ServerLess
| framework got him his MVP very quickly on a very scalable
| environment with minimal management.
| shaneprrlt wrote:
| API Gateway is the definite gotcha with serverless
| architectures. Whenever someone tells me how cheaper
| serverless is, I figure they haven't actually dived in to see
| how many AWS resources besides Lambda are required for a
| production deployment.
|
| It is convenient in several use cases, but for an endpoint or
| even an entire API that is going to receive a lot of load,
| managing servers is the more economical approach.
|
| If you need to get a one-off endpoint built that won't
| receive any significant amount of load, I think a serverless
| solution is great. But I wouldn't use it as my primary API
| architecture. Like most things in tech, there's no silver
| bullet. Context matters, and the best approach depends on
| many factors.
|
| I still recall this article by the creator of ipify on how
| he's able to receive upwards of 30 billion requests per month
| on Heroku for a fraction of the cost of API gateway:
| https://blog.heroku.com/scaling-ipify-to-30-billion-and-
| beyo...
| blantonl wrote:
| I run 8 different production API endpoints, all on Lambda,
| directly through Application Load Balancer instead of API
| Gateway, and they served 510 million requests last month
| for about $200.
|
| Those API endpoints took me about a day to deploy using
| serverless deployment tools. They economically scale
| between extremely varied workload requirements. There are
| no complaints on my end.
| koolba wrote:
| > Author also mentions other downsides such as "vendor lock-
| in," however his lambdas were written in NodeJs and it would
| be trivial to move his code to some other NodeJs delivery
| mechanism such as Fargate or ECS cluster.
|
| I find it amusing that your examples to which one could move
| the project and avoid "vendor lock-in" are both from the same
| vendor as Lambda.
|
| I get the point that it's not Lambda specific outside the
| entry point, it's just funny that the presented alternatives
| are still cutting a check to the same vendor.
| blantonl wrote:
| Well, the variability in this case is how much system
| administration you want to do. Right?
| vander_elst wrote:
| It's like 0.13qps on average. Assuming a constant load and no
| spikes, a raspberry pi should also be able to handle this load,
| it would be nice to compare the performance
| draw_down wrote:
| Well, there are a lot of other assumptions embedded in that
| comparison too. What's the raspberry pi's availability like vs
| Lambda?
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| My Raspiberry PI model 3 would do roughly[1] ~250 req/s with an
| Elixir server I wrote. 350k @ $3 requests seems kind of
| expensive to me to be honest.
| Klinky wrote:
| Is your pi at an AWS data center? How much to co-host it at
| an AWS-grade data center?
|
| Sure a self-hosted pi is cheaper, but that's an apples vs
| oranges comparison.
| whalesalad wrote:
| (This comment is unrelated to the use of lambda, and more of a
| note to the author)
|
| The author comments that they prefer the light mode to their own
| dark mode. I think that the dark mode would benefit greatly from
| being designed (color wise) bottom-up as a dark mode, versus just
| trying to toggle certain things to be darker.
|
| The big tell is that the lines separating each row of content
| appear to be the same color in both areas. This tells me that the
| color of the line is not determined based on the color behind it
| (either via transparency, via color manipulation manually, or via
| dynamic color manipulation from a tool like sass (ie, opacity(),
| darken(), etc...)
|
| I do agree w/ the author that light mode looks better. I also
| tend to prefer dark mode UIs. I think that by mindfully
| revisiting color a lot of the visual noise will go away and
| result in a more pleasant experience.
|
| tl;dr dark mode is not just inverting certain light colors to
| dark, it should be done with more care.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Seems like a better argument for not using FaaS after reading it
| all.
|
| It's also filled with "once you've done X Y is simple!" like:
|
| > Once you have the template ready, you can simply deploy your
| code by running: serverless deploy
|
| which is true for all automatable tasks. The same can be said for
| any VM or shared hosting.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| That completely misses the point of FaaS.
|
| Devs don't want to manage VMs. Patching, gold loads, SSH
| configs, k8s, so on. You write code, you deploy, and you pay
| only when the function executes. It scales as much as you want
| it to, as much as it needs to, and quicker even than EC2.
|
| There are very clear benefits to FaaS. It is certainly not for
| everyone, esp. if you already have a well functioning
| deployment pipeline.
| brintnc wrote:
| > Devs don't want to manage VMs. Patching, gold loads, SSH
| configs, k8s, so on
|
| Which devs?
|
| I'm a developer and I enjoy most of these things. Working
| with k8s is a pleasure, managing VMs can be quite simple (and
| more often than not, is). I don't do much patching, but I
| "SSH" into our k8s pods quite frequently. I've never thought,
| gee I wish I had a lambda to simplify this. I know I _also_
| don't represent all devs, but I'm never seen this comment
| made outside of it being an argument supporting FAAS.
| jayd16 wrote:
| If the author is already making an extension, could they have the
| extension set the security policy for these sites and simply
| display them in iframes? No cost at all.
| wackget wrote:
| They're not actually displaying the websites; they're pulling
| the top stories via each site's API and rendering them locally.
| treyhuffine wrote:
| Friend link (no paywall):
| https://levelup.gitconnected.com/handling-350k-requests-for-...
| ignoramous wrote:
| archive:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200228185628/https://levelup.g...
| merty wrote:
| This isn't actually one of those solutions where Lambda shines,
| pricing wise.
|
| I would simply trigger a Lambda function once a minute (or every
| X minutes) using CloudWatch to fetch the latest articles and save
| them to an S3 bucket which I would expose and cache using
| CloudFront or any other CDN service.
|
| This would lead to:
|
| - No Lambda costs as it would be covered by the monthly free tier
| of 1M requests.
|
| - No storage costs as the size of the stored data would be
| extremely small.
|
| - Really fast responses as the "response" would actually be a
| static file cached at the CDN.
|
| - The only parameter defining your cost would be your CDN of
| choice, which would cost somewhere between free and as low as
| $10/TB. For a project like the one in the article, that's
| hundreds of millions of requests for just $10.
| chasers wrote:
| Cloudflare is $0.50 per million.
| jessmay wrote:
| Can the extension not make the http requests to get this info? Am
| I missing the need for a backend for this type of work?
| treyhuffine wrote:
| API keys I believe
| jccooper wrote:
| As mentioned in the article, some of the data sources use API
| keys which the author didn't want to make available to end
| users.
| danols wrote:
| Is there anyone but me who uses the premium article on medium.com
| as a filter for what is NOT worth my time?
|
| I believe in the tech space the majority of readers who write in
| depth worth to read articles are not incentivised by a few
| dollars kickback from their hard work from medium.com. They often
| write it for personal profile enhancement or company blog
| marketing reasons and want to reach maximum audience and will
| keep it free for all.
|
| The problem nowadays though is that medium.com is often able to
| trick them by making the article premium through deceptive ui
| even when that is not their intention. Just look at the
| googlecloud medium blog and you constantly see premium articles
| there which seems bizarre.
| wj wrote:
| I haven't subscribed to Medium but there are certainly some
| articles/guides I have read there over the years that have been
| helpful.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I use medium.com as a filter in general.
| danols wrote:
| readers-> authors
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-02-28 23:00 UTC)