[talawahtech]

Theoretically, if container start up times are around 125ms it should be possible to achieve this with Fargate + Knative's "scale to zero" functionality[1]. AWS is already working on improving Fargate/Kubernetes integration.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/knative/

[coder543]

Doesn't a Kubernetes master on Fargate cost a significantly non-zero amount of money? Pretty sure it does.

[talawahdotnet]

Sure, but if you already have one then there is no incremental cost.

It would be great if they announced that they were gonna remove EKS master costs altogether. Technically Firecracker should make it possible for them to run that infrastructure more efficiently :)

[sitkack]

Only dev instances should see zero traffic, any production site will have > 0 load at all times.

[coder543]

That's not completely accurate.

- If we're talking about a business that provides a service to local companies, there are quite a few hours during the week where everyone is either asleep or enjoying their weekend. Not every company has millions of users spread across every time zone; some companies provide a niche service to a small number of high paying users.

- Lots of developers have small hobby projects that are inactive for most of the day/week.

Scale to zero can be convenient, but it's not usually a make-or-break thing.

[sitkack]

Those folks would be ideally suited for Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc. All of the function as a service providers have a cost model that only make sense for < (some really low qps). A $10 DO instance can handle how many $$ worth of FuncaaS?

[coder543]

I mean, the first 1 million Lambda invocations and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute are free each month... you can do a lot of things within the free tier alone. That free allocation represents about $7 worth of Lambda resources. Assuming that it cost the same to write your application to run in Lambda as it would to write it as standalone, which it almost certainly doesn't due to (probably) immature frameworks, that would be really nice for certain businesses. I agree that it is a niche, and savings of a few dollars a month aren't generally valuable to viable businesses.

What I was getting at is that the "scale to zero" feature with Knative is rather worthless if you spend more money just running the Kubernetes master on EKS alone than you would spend running a $5 or $10 per month DigitalOcean instance.

Lambda scales all the way to zero, and it's free when it's at zero. You just pay for what you use. Actually, you pay for what you use minus $7, since every account always gets the free tier for Lambda.

[sitkack]

I was using the DO instance as a standard unit, so on DO $10 gives you (1vCPU 2GB)

    5M GB seconds (2 * 86e3 * 28)
    2400M function invocations @1k qps, (86e3 * 1e3 * 28 / 1e6)

with that, the DO query load represents $17k

Does the math checkout?

I know which model allows me to "scale to zero" faster. If I hand you $10, you will give me a nice used Honda?

[xmly]

Yep, if with KNative, it is possible.