[posabsolute]

It's funny we tested lambda + Amazon gateway api this week at work.

It's awesome!.. Until you have to deal with the cold start issue. Our first call takes about 1.5 seconds; and then all other calls take about 50-80ms.

Your container stays in cache about 5-10 minutes unless it is called back, there are no guarantees.

This micro service is not called often and for us 1.5 seconds is never acceptable.

[imglorp]

Our issue was price. Boss did the math for our use case, around a million hits/sec 24/7, and it worked out to billions of dollars. We're building a solution (on aws) for a little less than that.

[x5n1]

It's good the boss can do that sort of math. That's why you need him and why he is called the boss.

[eistrati]

Why do I have a feeling that you are the "boss" in this picture? :)

[toomuchtodo]

You could use a scheduled cron task in Lambda to make requests to keep your API hot.

[posabsolute]

Yeah we thought about that, but is it reliable? We were really not sure we could always get rid of the cold start issue.

[twagner]

AWS Lambda function schedules are driven off the same fault-tolerant, highly available service that powers SWF. (So...yes, they're reliable :)

[anonymoushn]

Is keeping it hot with a cron job reliable though?

[toadkicker]

Give SNS/SQS a look for polling solutions for API Gateway. We got around it by having a health check call in our set up.

[beefsack]

You could potentially use that task as an availability test too.

[CodeWriter23]

There's the performance issue on startup, then there's the cost issue with the typical case. With the "round up to the nearest 100ms" pricing, your example ends up overpaying 20-50% for the _typical_ case. If you have any serious use of your app, you are better off with DIY on EC2 or using Heroku.