Amazon Web Services vs AWS Lambda

• AWS constantly innovates and iterates, announcing new features several times per year. Earlier this year, for example, they introduced provisioned IOPS for EBS, suddenly providing us with an inexpensive solution to a performance quandary we'd been facing.
• AWS has provided us with access to the product owners and architects of the products we use most. In turn, those resources provided us with visibility into the product road maps. This enabled us to improve our long-term infrastructure planning, and avoid expensive features that we'd get for free later in the year.
• AWS peremptorily lowers costs a couple of times per year. This has helped us keep our bill reasonable even as we consume more and more of the AWS services. We periodically compare the cost of AWS to the cost of moving into our colo, and every year the colo looks less and less attractive.

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• Easy to deploy
• Easy to integrate with DynamoDB
• SQS Support makes it easier to monitor and integrate
• Easy to scale
• Pay for what you use, not idle time
• Focus on your business logic

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• AWS has a record of occasional severe outages, which has a cascading effect on the large number of high-profile services that now run on its infrastructure. Despite the spectacular nature of these outages, it is unlikely that a self-managed data center would achieve significantly better uptime.
• It is also the case that AWS outages can be mitigated with effective use of multiple deployment 'zones' and regions. This is something that any mission-critical application should be doing anyway as part of disaster recovery preparations.

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• Vendor lock-in: While a basic function or microservice might be platform independent, when you start to use AWS APIs and interact with other AWS services, your microservice now relies on the AWS ecosystem
• A bit intimidating at first, however there are a lot of resources. Amazon could offer more templates and examples though

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• I have seen people spend a lot of money just playing with AWS because they had no idea what they were doing. Pay attention, and know what you are getting into before you do anything.
• My previous company was in the process of moving entirely to AWS, and I know it had to be cost effective because they had datacenters at over 20 locations.

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• For my Alexa skills, I have no complaints. AWS Lambda functions were required to get the skills working and they haven’t failed at all.

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