Your mileage may vary. I process tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) of requests on Lambda each month. If you have meaningful volume, cold starts aren't a problem. And when with my volume of traffic, lambda use is a tiny fraction of my AWS bill ($30 max?). I'd be interested to know who is dissatisfied with the cost and paying more than $100/mo and what you're running (and how that would be expensive for you, considering the kind of operation you must be running).
But also, if you don't have highly variable traffic, why would you use Lambda in the first place? If you have negligible traffic (enough to sit on the free tier), why not just use a single cheap EC2 instance? Lambda trades start time for lack of a server—it's shared resource utilization taken to the extreme. You're lowering your cost by letting AWS use the bare minimum to keep your service available, and that means turning your code off when it's not running. If you want to keep your code available at a hundred millisecond's notice, just have a server running.
I assume most of the folks running into this just couldn't be bothered to pay the $7/mo for a hobby Heroku dyno or run a dirt cheap EC2 instance. Really interested to hear from folks that find Lambda impractical for serious use cases.
Cold starts are only a problem if you’re latency sensitive; I forgot to specify that.
I’m speaking from the context of a large company that’s well beyond the free tier, for whom AWS bills matter. If you’re down in the free tier, setup time dominates all other concerns.
But also, if you don't have highly variable traffic, why would you use Lambda in the first place? If you have negligible traffic (enough to sit on the free tier), why not just use a single cheap EC2 instance? Lambda trades start time for lack of a server—it's shared resource utilization taken to the extreme. You're lowering your cost by letting AWS use the bare minimum to keep your service available, and that means turning your code off when it's not running. If you want to keep your code available at a hundred millisecond's notice, just have a server running.
I assume most of the folks running into this just couldn't be bothered to pay the $7/mo for a hobby Heroku dyno or run a dirt cheap EC2 instance. Really interested to hear from folks that find Lambda impractical for serious use cases.