[PaulRobinson]

This is what people are missing on Lambda. It's pay-to-play, and for 90% of the sites out there, they're paying too much in comparison.

If you're running server instances 24x7 for an application that is doing < 25 requests/minute on average, you would probably find your hosting costs come down (perhaps to zero) and your reliability would increase considerably if you moved to Lambda-style applications.

serverless.io is a decent framework to get started (allows for local dev and testing, manages deployment) and is agnostic in terms of deployment target: AWS, IBM, Google coming soon, etc.

The only reason we're not rolling it out everywhere at work is because it assumes all developers are deploying directly from their term with god-like CloudFormation access. Nope, nope, nooope. We just need to build the deploy pipeline for it, and then off we go.

[jjeaff]

But are they really paying too much? I can't think of a lot of products out there, especially those that have a recurring subscription, that don't required some sort of database. So you need a server running a database anyway. It seems that the subscription logic would be a very negligible addition to the instance you have to be running anyway.

To me it seems like the only sweet spot for lambda on a large scale would be for those that have consistent usage of a small instance that have some extra functions that need to be highly scalable and are very inconsistent.

[PaulRobinson]

There are multiple alternatives to running your own DB service, and again, all pay-per-use.

In the original article the author suggested on a successful subscription a write to the MailChimp API (because that's the product). In that example, MailChimp is the DB. You don't have to run a copy of a DB locally if you architect things like that. Obviously if the call fails, you need to think about what you fall back to, which is why error handling is such a critical piece of the the Lambda ecosystem - as it should be for every ecosystem, really.

[lsaferite]

In this case you should really just dump the subscription on a queue (SQS) and process the payment to mailchimp on a different thread that can deal with errors.

[kagx]

For data storage, you can use aws DynamoDb (NoSQL), which has some generous monthly free tier.

[simonpantzare]

You could use DynamoDB and S3 for persistence if you're taking the AWS route.

[PanMan]

Did you mean serverless.com? serverless.io is a parked domain...

[encoderer]

This is doubly true with their generous free tier. It applies per-region so for some tasks you can spread workloads out across regions and reduce costs. Cronitor runs about 6 million multi-second lambda invocations a month for $20.

[avip]

It's serverless.com