AWS Lambda vs FaaS

Overview

AWS Lambda

Stacks26.0K

Followers18.8K

Votes432

FaaS

Stacks5

Followers28

Votes1

AWS Lambda vs FaaS: What are the differences?

Key differences between AWS Lambda and FaaS

AWS Lambda and FaaS (Function as a Service) are both cloud computing services that allow developers to deploy and run code without the need to provision or manage servers. However, there are some key differences between the two:

Function boundaries: In AWS Lambda, functions are typically limited to a single programming language, such as Node.js, Java, or Python. On the other hand, FaaS platforms like OpenFaaS or Knative allow developers to run functions written in multiple languages within a single platform, providing more flexibility and choice.
Vendor lock-in: AWS Lambda is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) specific service, meaning that it ties developers to the AWS ecosystem. Alternatively, FaaS platforms are generally more open and can be deployed on various cloud providers, reducing vendor lock-in and enabling multi-cloud strategies.
Customization and control: With AWS Lambda, developers have limited control over the underlying infrastructure and are constrained by the service's limitations. On the other hand, FaaS platforms provide more customization options and control, allowing developers to fine-tune their functions and infrastructure to meet specific requirements.
Pricing model: AWS Lambda adopts a pay-per-use pricing model, charging for the total number of invocations and the execution duration of functions. In contrast, FaaS platforms may offer different pricing models, such as flat-rate or usage-based, giving developers more flexibility in terms of cost optimization.
Community and ecosystem: AWS Lambda is backed by a robust and extensive community of users, which results in a wide range of resources, documentation, and support available. FaaS platforms, while less established, are rapidly growing and have an active community, but may have fewer resources and support options compared to AWS Lambda.
Security and compliance: AWS Lambda is built on top of the AWS infrastructure, which is compliant with various industry standards and regulations, such as HIPAA or GDPR. FaaS platforms may have different security and compliance measures in place, depending on the cloud provider or deployment environment chosen.

In summary, AWS Lambda and FaaS differ in terms of function boundaries, vendor lock-in, customization, pricing model, community and ecosystem, as well as security and compliance measures.

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Advice on AWS Lambda, FaaS

Tim

CTO at Checkly Inc.

Sep 18, 2019

Needs adviceon

Heroku

AWS Lambda

When adding a new feature to Checkly rearchitecting some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda . The short story:

Developer Experience trumps everything.
AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impact not only your wallet.
If you need geographic spread, AWS is lonely at the top.

The setup

Recently, I was doing a brainstorm at a startup here in Berlin on the future of their infrastructure. They were ready to move on from their initial, almost 100% Ec2 + Chef based setup. Everything was on the table. But we crossed out a lot quite quickly:

Pure, uncut, self hosted Kubernetes — way too much complexity
Managed Kubernetes in various flavors — still too much complexity
Zeit — Maybe, but no Docker support
Elastic Beanstalk — Maybe, bit old but does the job
Heroku
Lambda

It became clear a mix of PaaS and FaaS was the way to go. What a surprise! That is exactly what I use for Checkly! But when do you pick which model?

I chopped that question up into the following categories:

Developer Experience / DX 🤓
Ops Experience / OX 🐂 (?)
Cost 💵
Lock in 🔐

Read the full post linked below for all details

357k views357k

Comments

Mark

Nov 2, 2020

Needs adviceon

Microsoft Azure

Need advice on what platform, systems and tools to use.

Evaluating whether to start a new digital business for which we will need to build a website that handles all traffic. Website only right now. May add smartphone apps later. No desktop app will ever be added. Website to serve various countries and languages. B2B and B2C type customers. Need to handle heavy traffic, be low cost, and scale well.

We are open to either build it on AWS or on Microsoft Azure.

Apologies if I'm leaving out some info. My first post. :) Thanks in advance!

133k views133k

Comments

Cory

Mar 28, 2021

Decided

Netlfiy Functions uses AWS Lambda under the hood, but Netlify adds some nice sugar. The biggest advantage is the local development experience with netlify-cli. This allows you to run your functions locally with local configuration or pull configs from the Netlify dashboard. I built a health-check endpoint in about 2 minutes, and my send-email function in less than an hour.

28.2k views28.2k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

AWS Lambda	FaaS
AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.	FaaS is a platform for building serverless functions on Docker Swarm Mode with first class metrics. Any UNIX process can be packaged as a function in FaaS enabling you to consume a range of web events without repetitive boiler-plate coding.
Extend other AWS services with custom logic;Build custom back-end services;Completely Automated Administration;Built-in Fault Tolerance;Automatic Scaling;Integrated Security Model;Bring Your Own Code;Pay Per Use;Flexible Resource Model	-
Statistics
Stacks 26.0K	Stacks 5
Followers 18.8K	Followers 28
Votes 432	Votes 1
Pros & Cons
Pros 129 No infrastructure 83 Cheap 70 Quick 59 Stateless 47 No deploy, no server, great sleep Cons 7 Cant execute ruby or go 3 Compute time limited 1 Can't execute PHP w/o significant effort	Pros 1 Simple way to build serverless applications
Integrations
No integrations available	Docker Docker Swarm

What are some alternatives to AWS Lambda, FaaS?

Azure Functions

Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems.

Google Cloud Run

A managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. It's serverless by abstracting away all infrastructure management.

Serverless

Build applications comprised of microservices that run in response to events, auto-scale for you, and only charge you when they run. This lowers the total cost of maintaining your apps, enabling you to build more logic, faster. The Framework uses new event-driven compute services, like AWS Lambda, Google CloudFunctions, and more.

Google Cloud Functions

Construct applications from bite-sized business logic billed to the nearest 100 milliseconds, only while your code is running

Knative

Knative provides a set of middleware components that are essential to build modern, source-centric, and container-based applications that can run anywhere: on premises, in the cloud, or even in a third-party data center

OpenFaaS

Serverless Functions Made Simple for Docker and Kubernetes

Nuclio

nuclio is portable across IoT devices, laptops, on-premises datacenters and cloud deployments, eliminating cloud lock-ins and enabling hybrid solutions.

Apache OpenWhisk

OpenWhisk is an open source serverless platform. It is enterprise grade and accessible to all developers thanks to its superior programming model and tooling. It powers IBM Cloud Functions, Adobe I/O Runtime, Naver, Nimbella among others.

Cloud Functions for Firebase

Cloud Functions for Firebase lets you create functions that are triggered by Firebase products, such as changes to data in the Realtime Database, uploads to Cloud Storage, new user sign ups via Authentication, and conversion events in Analytics.

AWS Batch

It enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. It dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources (e.g., CPU or memory optimized instances) based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs submitted.

Related Comparisons

AWS Lambda vs FaaS: What are the differences?

Key differences between AWS Lambda and FaaS

Function boundaries: In AWS Lambda, functions are typically limited to a single programming language, such as Node.js, Java, or Python. On the other hand, FaaS platforms like OpenFaaS or Knative allow developers to run functions written in multiple languages within a single platform, providing more flexibility and choice.
Vendor lock-in: AWS Lambda is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) specific service, meaning that it ties developers to the AWS ecosystem. Alternatively, FaaS platforms are generally more open and can be deployed on various cloud providers, reducing vendor lock-in and enabling multi-cloud strategies.
Customization and control: With AWS Lambda, developers have limited control over the underlying infrastructure and are constrained by the service's limitations. On the other hand, FaaS platforms provide more customization options and control, allowing developers to fine-tune their functions and infrastructure to meet specific requirements.
Pricing model: AWS Lambda adopts a pay-per-use pricing model, charging for the total number of invocations and the execution duration of functions. In contrast, FaaS platforms may offer different pricing models, such as flat-rate or usage-based, giving developers more flexibility in terms of cost optimization.
Community and ecosystem: AWS Lambda is backed by a robust and extensive community of users, which results in a wide range of resources, documentation, and support available. FaaS platforms, while less established, are rapidly growing and have an active community, but may have fewer resources and support options compared to AWS Lambda.
Security and compliance: AWS Lambda is built on top of the AWS infrastructure, which is compliant with various industry standards and regulations, such as HIPAA or GDPR. FaaS platforms may have different security and compliance measures in place, depending on the cloud provider or deployment environment chosen.

In summary, AWS Lambda and FaaS differ in terms of function boundaries, vendor lock-in, customization, pricing model, community and ecosystem, as well as security and compliance measures.

AWS Lambda vs FaaS

Overview

AWS Lambda vs FaaS: What are the differences?