[etrain]

Keep in mind that with EC2 you're billed hourly so the fastest a 70 cpu-hour job could finish on m3.medium for $0.70 is 1 hour, and that's ignoring setup time, etc.

Meanwhile, on Lambda, you can actually run 1600 60s jobs (or 27 CPU-hours) in 3 minutes. This is inclusive of setup time, job submission, stragglers, etc. [1]

Of course, if you've got sustained load, it's cheaper to go with spot instances, but the "occasionally I need a buttload of compute," model is well-served by Lambda.

[1] http://ericjonas.com/pywren.html

[IanCal]

As a note for people, if your constraints are a bit different then these are some services to check out:

Joyent Manta: https://www.joyent.com/manta

Hyper: http://hyper.sh

Possibly Joyent Triton: https://www.joyent.com/triton

I personally often want to run a bunch of things for ~1-15 minutes, and have too much data or setup to fit neatly in a lambda function. However, I don't need 1000 things running simultaneously, although manta would help still there.

I'd love to see some more layers over the top of services like this, hopefully someday getting us back to picloud. I miss that service.

[marktangotango]

How secure are docker hosts like hyper.sh? I've always been skeptical, the multitenant docker security story hasn't been very encouraging, or has that changed?

[riobard]

hyper.sh containers are kernel-isolated like virtual machines.