[discodave]

Amazon loves it when you run idle EC2 instances ($$$) rather than using Lambda.

Most real workloads I've seen (at 3 startups, and several teams at Amazon) have utilization under 10%.

[_heimdall]

That's really where you see that no answer is right across the board.

I worked at a very small startup years ago that leaned heavily on EC2. Our usage was pretty bipolar, the service was along the lines of a real-time game so we either had a very heavy work load or nothing. We stood up EC2 instances when games were lice and wound them down after.

We did use Lambda for a few things, mainly APIs that were rarely used or for processing jobs in an event queue.

Serverless has its place for sure, but in my experience it have been heavily over used the last 3-5 years.

[Dylan16807]

I think the solution to that problem is usually to have fewer and smaller EC2 instances.

And you only need to get utilization up to like 15% to make reserved instances significantly better than lambda.