Amazon Web Services vs AWS Lambda

• AWS (Amazon Web Services) is not the easiest virtual service to set up but once you get the hang of it, it's fairly easy to install new instances (servers) and stop them. This is good for multiple reasons e.g we run multiple tests and live production servers for our different services. When we are done with one we can easily turn it off. The cost of the specifications on our virtual servers is only a fraction of the cost of what we would get locally or even on most traditional web services companies.
• Amazon Web Services can be relatively cost efficient depending on where you are coming from. For our smaller organization, we felt the cost was worth it as other alternatives were not as affordable. The good thing with AWS is you only pay for what you use. If you want S3 (Simple Storage Service), you can pay for that. If you want to run a compute engine, EC2 can be paid for. At the end of the month, you get one bill based on your usage.
• Because of our size as a company, AWS was easier to deploy compared to local dedicated solutions. All we had to do was take our development team through a simple 2-day course to get them on board. The ease of deployment means that we do not have to hire a specialist to deploy servers for us.

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• Reliability - Lambdas just work. They do their job and quite well. I've never had any hiccups with them as a unit of hardware.
• Scalability - This automatic scaling and availability are amazing. It's like having a fleet of servers at the ready but only when needed. And at a fraction of the cost.
• Price - AWS gives you a generous helping of free invocations every month, and even after that, it's still cheap compared to an always-on solution.

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• Better user support would be nice. It seems hard to find help when you need something specific from an Amazon employee.
• Even though the prices are set up for enterprise they do seem high for small to mid level businesses, compared to other alternatives.
• It would be nice to be able to have some type of DB security built in to the EC2s or as a default.

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• UI could use some improvement - Like the rest of the Amazon Web Services UI, much of the interface is complex and hard to understand at the beginning.
• Hard to troubleshoot/debug - Lambda, in itself, is set up in an environment that makes it difficult to troubleshoot in the product. The use of staging production code is absolutely necessary.
• The pricing is a bit more expensive when compared to other services that provide lambda function execution services.

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• We are able to test new ideas quickly using AWS hosting.
• We are able to move from conceptual POC to fully hosted/architected cloud solution in minimal time.
• We are able to build solutions that are 100% cloud as well as cloud-hybrid that orchestrate between our datacenters and the AWS cloud.

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• I was able to perform a lot of processing on data delivered from my website and little or no cost. This was a big plus to me.
• Programming AWS Lambda is quite easy once you understand the time limits to the functions.
• AWS Lambda has really good integration with the AWS S3 storage system. This a very good method of delivering data to be processed and a good place to pick it up after processing.

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