While there is a lot of lambda/serverless hate in this thread, I (who have no experience with it) am reluctant to conclude based on this alone that lambda is useless/stupid. Need more info.
Is there anyone who has had success using lambda, or can anyone find a write-up of a success story?
That would help me (and others) understand/believe better I think; if it's a very rare case where lambda ends up being helpful (which is the opinion of this HN thread apparently), a case study write-up of a real world success story would still help us understand when we _aren't_ in that situation.
For my organization, Lambda has been instrumental in allowing us to take some highly trafficked, small API services, and migrate them from NodeJS based servers that we manage to Lambda and Application Load Balancer that just works with no involvement. We're not relying on the API gateway (which is expensive and better suited for non-public APIs).
Many of these APIs are Ajax type status updates, JWT issuers, authentication handlers and other utilities. We use the serverless framework to deploy the code, and it works very nicely for us.
The hate is real in these comments, but for us we are able to move 500 million+/month API requests with minimal code changes, easy scaling up and down, and we were able to learn a little something about serverless architectures and their viability for other possible things in the future.
The best use of Lambda is to programmatically respond to an event that was triggered by an AWS service, and typically have the response go to another AWS service. Lambda is a poor choice for tasks outside of this domain.
We used it with great success in our data pipeline. Payload data comes into an S3 bucket, Lambdas will transform that data into a standard format and pipe the result to another S3 bucket. The data then needs to be filtered, post processed, then sent to many different data sources owned by different teams (inside or outside of AWS). Each of these steps are also a Lambda.
The benefits are that up to a thousand concurrent Lambdas can be running, so performance doesn't really degrade with service loads. We can handle requests from dozens of teams all over the world with a team of two developers. We almost never have an unexpected outage. And, most importantly to me, we can add new features very quickly.
For example, when a team builds a model in Python against the data, other teams want access to said model, our team can port it and integrate it into the pipeline in a day or two.
Is there anyone who has had success using lambda, or can anyone find a write-up of a success story?
That would help me (and others) understand/believe better I think; if it's a very rare case where lambda ends up being helpful (which is the opinion of this HN thread apparently), a case study write-up of a real world success story would still help us understand when we _aren't_ in that situation.