alt Hacker NewsThey're also good for extremely bursty loads. I use Lambdas extensively for a radar imagery API that delivers the images for an Android live wallpaper that shows weather radar.
That particular use case can go from hardly any traffic at all to a hurricane of traffic during something like, well, a hurricane.
For consistent processing loads, I think I could save money by just running on dedicated EC2 instances, but you cannot beat the instant scale of Lambdas.
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I often hear this argument that it is good for bursty load, but for real, there are a lot of inconvenient limitations. For exemple, you don't really control the number of concurrent instances or the scaling except if you pay for very expensive provisioning.
So you might have to wait for 10s or more to have a new lambda instance spawning up and replying to your requests. And you might have to have your function finish in 15 minutes, deals with the strange concurrency and scaling rules lambda is based on.
There's nothing particularly special about Lambda's scaling. You can do the same with GCP Cloud Run[0] or Azure Container Apps[1]
Specify the maximum number of allowed instances and maximum concurrency per instance. Optionally configure more targeted scale rules. It will scale it from 0 - n as needed.
[0] https://docs.cloud.google.com/run/docs/about-instance-autosc...
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/container-apps/scale...