AWS Lambda vs. CloudFoundry

Lambda excels at event-driven, short-lived tasks, such as processing files or building simple APIs. However, it's less ideal for long-running, computationally intensive, or applications that rely on carrying the state between jobs. Cold starts and constant load can easily balloon the costs.

Incentivized

It's well suited if:

• The organization has large number of applications that needs to be deployed frequently.
• The organization is tied to the DevOps mindset.
• The organization has programs in different languages.
• The applications does not need EJB's support that servers like web logic provide.

It's less suited if:

• The applications needs security configuration within the same CloudFoundry instance.
• The organization, for whatever reason does not want developers to manage the instances.

Incentivized

• No provisioning required - we don't have to pay anything upfront
• Serverless deployment - it gets executed only when request comes and we pay only for the time the request is getting executed
• Integrates well with AWS CloudWatch triggers so it is easy to setup scheduled tasks like cron jobs

Incentivized

• Support for Orgs and Spaces that allow for managing users and deployables within a large organization.
• Easy deployment, deploying code is as simple as executing single line from CLI, thanks to build-packs.
• Solid and rich CLI, that allows for various operations on the instance.
• Isolated Virtual Machines called Droplets, that provide clean run time environment for the code. This used to be a problem with Weblogic and other application servers, where multiple applications are run on the same cluster and they share resources.
• SSH capability for the droplet (isolated VM's are called droplets), that allows for real time viewing of the App code while the application is running.
• Support for multiple languages, thanks to build-packs.
• Support for horizontal scaling, scaling an instance horizontally is a breeze.
• Support for configuring environment variable using the service bindings.
• Supports memory and disk space limit allocation for individual applications.
• Supports API's as well as workers (processes without endpoints)
• Supports blue-green deployment with minimal down time

Incentivized

• Developing test cases for Lambda functions can be difficult. For functions that require some sort of input it can be tough to develop the proper payload and event for a test.
• For the uninitiated, deploying functions with Infrastructure as Code tools can be a challenging undertaking.
• Logging the output of a function feels disjointed from running the function in the console. A tighter integration with operational logging would be appreciated, perhaps being able to view function logs from the Lambda console instead of having to navigate over to CloudWatch.
• Sometimes its difficult to determine the correct permissions needed for Lambda execution from other AWS services.

Incentivized

• Does not support stateful containers and that would be a nice to have.
• Supports showing logs, but does not persist the logs anywhere. This makes relying on Cloud Foundry's logs very unreliable. The logs have to be persisted using other third party tools like Elk and Kibana.

Incentivized

I give it a seven is usability because it's AWS. Their UI's are always clunkier than the competition and their documentation is rather cumbersome. There's SO MUCH to dig through and it's a gamble if you actually end up finding the corresponding info if it will actually help. Like I said before, going to google with a specific problem is likely a better route because AWS is quite ubiquitous and chances are you're not the first to encounter the problem. That being said, using SAM (Serverless application model) and it's SAM Local environment makes running local instances of your Lambdas in dev environments painless and quite fun. Using Nodejs + Lambda + SAM Local + VS Code debugger = AWESOME.

Incentivized

Amazon consistently provides comprehensive and easy-to-parse documentation of all AWS features and services. Most development team members find what they need with a quick internet search of the AWS documentation available online. If you need advanced support, though, you might need to engage an AWS engineer, and that could be an unexpected (or unwelcome) expense.

Incentivized

AWS Lambda is good for short running functions, and ideally in response to events within AWS. Google App Engine is a more robust environment which can have complex code running for long periods of time, and across more than one instance of hardware. Google App Engine allows for both front-end and back-end infrastructure, while AWS Lambda is only for small back-end functions

Incentivized

While Docker shines in providing support for volumes and stateful instances, Cloud foundry shines in providing support for deploying stateless services. Heroku shines in integrating with Git and using commits to git as hooks to trigger deployments right from the command line. But it does not provide on-premise solution that Cloud foundry provides.

Incentivized

• Positive - Only paying for when code is run, unlike virtual machines where you pay always regardless of processing power usage.
• Positive - Scalability and accommodating larger amounts of demand is much cheaper. Instead of scaling up virtual machines and increasing the prices you pay for that, you are just increasing the number of times your lambda function is run.
• Negative - Debugging/troubleshooting, and developing for lambda functions take a bit more time to get used to, and migrating code from virtual machines and normal processes to Lambda functions can take a bit of time.

Incentivized

• Positive impact, since it simplifies the deployment time by a huge margin. Without cloud foundry, deploying a code needs coordination with infrastructure teams, while with cloud foundry, its a simple one line command. This reduces the deployment time from at least few hours to few minutes. Faster deployments promote faster dev cycle iterations.
• Code maintenance such as upgrading a Node or Java version is as simple as updating the build-pack. Without cloud foundry, using web logic, the specific version only supports a specific version of Java. So updating the version involves upgrading the version of web logic that needs to involve few teams. So without cloud foundry, it takes at least few days, with cloud foundry, its a matter of few mins.
• Overall, happier Developers and thats harder to quantify.

Incentivized