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by jorgecurio 3747 days ago
> In November 2014 AWS Lambda was released and it was nothing short than a revolution.

still not good enough to be reliable in production, more expensive than running on micro instance or digitalocean.

Lambda needs a serious makeover soon or it risks developer abandonment. It's great to lock yourself in with a cloud provider. That's the only serious benefit you get. You still need to figure out how to scale properly, getting on AWS helps but it's not a plug and play scalable thing.

I've largely abandoned development on Lambda because you have to upload your code every time which is annoying. Not only that, they randomly take 5~10 seconds to respond. Also unhelpful are service error messages with no explanation or help from discussion boards. I was told to purchase their support license.

So it seems like AWS is locking in developers and companies with a non user friendly documentation and arcane hidden pitfalls then leaving them no choice but to purchase support since the cost is cheap (pay to play right?) until you add up the effort of integrating with AWS and the cost of lock-in....

AWS lambda is great for prototyping but it doesn't have the tools or a proper development guideline to utilize it. There doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm from AWS either, and if they pull the plug, well hope you didn't build any mission critical apps on lambda backends because you are going to have some considerable downtime.

1 comments

Can you share some more details about what you're trying to do with us? There's a latency floor when using the API Gateway of about 200 ms, which is unacceptable for a lot of APIs, but other than that we largely haven't been running into the issues you're dealing with. And if Meetup is any indication, AWS seems really invested in Lambda. (In terms of cost, it really would depend on what you're using it for.)
well I built a user authentication and it takes 5~6 seconds for a real simple operation. it happens randomly and no way to debug it.

the opacity of being able to peer at what's going on in the backend is a real problem with AWS Lambda. I think that this lack of insight is going to bite down the road. Even now, I'm getting 'service error' with NO EXPLANATION what happened.

No offense, but this sounds exactly like the experience I had, and many friends had, before we actually learned how to use the service. If I had to guess, you're using the smallest possible 128MB config and not calling it very often. This presents a maximally-bad first experience for devs by Amazon but is not reflective of how it works once you get some actual utilization happening. All that said I moved to containers on Azure for unrelated reasons. But Lambda works fine (within its obvious architectural restrictions) and they'll hold your hand for a $49/month developer service plan fee.