AWS Lambda is a serverless computing platform that lets users run code without provisioning or managing servers. With Lambda, users can run code for virtually any type of app or backend service—all with zero administration. It takes of requirements to run and scale code with high availability.
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Platform.sh
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Platform.sh helps companies of all sizes, from SaaS entrepreneurs looking to build, run, and scale their websites and web applications.
[AWS Lambda] is very well suited for the projects that doesn't have any infra but needs it where short running processes are required. But if your application need to run continuously than this might not be the very apt tool for you.
In our organisation we are the only team that uses Platform.sh to host any site. This was a cost effective way for us as we were using Acquia Cloud earlier for these websites. We mostly use Platform.sh for those sites which are always in development as it is simpler and faster to handle these operations in Platform.sh. Then we do a lift and shift to Acquia as we move more towards the go live and post production maintenance side.
Lambda provides multiple methods for triggering functions, this includes AWS resources and services and external triggers like APIs and CLI calls.
The compute provided my Lambda is largely hands off for operations teams. Once the function is deployed, the management overhead is minimal since there are no servers to maintain.
Lambda's pricing can be very cost effective given that users are only charged for the time the function runs and associated costs like network or storage if those are used. A function that executes quickly and is not called often can cost next to nothing.
Putting a significant portion of your codebase into AWS Lambda and taking advantage of the high level of integration with other AWS services comes with the risk of vendor lock-in.
While the AWS Lambda environment is "not your problem," it's also not at your disposal to extend or modify, nor does it preserve state between function executions.
AWS Lambda functions are subject to strict time limitations, and will be aborted if they exceed five minutes of execution time. This can be a problem for some longer-running tasks that are otherwise well-suited to serverless delivery.
Platform.sh is not for beginners in my opinion. It has a good amount of learning curve in my opinion.
As this is a PaaS, teams habituated with cloud infrastructure may miss the server side support from their cloud teams. I believe you will have to work on server bugs more on your own.
During normal maintenance periods, integrations may fail if you are working on your sites in that time, in my experience.
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.
I have not needed support for AWS Lambda, since it is already using Python, which has resources all over the internet. AWS blog posts have information about how to install some libraries, which is necessary for some more complex operations, but this is available online and didn't require specific customer support for.
Azure Functions is another product that provides lambda functionality, but the documentation for some of Azure's products is quite hard to read. Additionally, AWS Lambda was one of the first cloud computing products on a large cloud service that implemented lambda functions, so they have had the most time to develop the product, increase the quality of service, and extend functionality to more languages. Amazon, by far, has the best service for Lambda that I know.
In our team we use Platform.sh mostly while sites are in developmental phase. Then we do a lift and shift to either Acquia or AWS depending on the type of sites we have. Platform.sh is really cost effective and more fluid in terms of Continuous Development hence the usage. After said development is done, we generally lift and shift to Acquia for more content heavy sites and to AWS for more transaction oriented sites.
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.
