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One of the biggest arguments (among many others) for going serverless is the dramatic cost reduction you experience. Since the whole gist of serverless is that you only pay for the time your code is executed, it will result in a significantly lower AWS bill (in most cases). Sounds too good to be true? Let’s see what some early adopters of serverless have said about it:
Avner Sorek has shared how he moved a simple Express.JS application (a side project with 50-150 daily visits) — from AWS Elastic Beanstalk to Lambda+APIG. The whole migration took less than a day and it resulted in a ~90% reduction of costs – from $44.95 to $6.12 per month. See the graph below:
Anver’s website is called libhive and it’s built in Node.JS with ExpressJS, and backed by DynamoDB.
Mohsiur Rahman from Heavywater writes how their previous infrastructure kept getting more and more expensive for them: “Even with most of our EC2 instances sized as t2.micro, our AWS bills kept increasing. In the span of just 4 months, our monthly bill increased from $10K to $30K with over 1,000 EC2 instances running.”
Just by going serverless, their infrastructure costs went down to $4000 from close to $30,000 at one point. See the graph below:
Heavywater Inc (acquired by Black Knight Inc) is using artificial intelligence virtual assistants to offer business process outsourcing.
Adam Pash at Postlight shared how he solved a $10,000 per month hosting bill problem at Postlight by going serverless (running on AWS Lambda and API Gateway, built and deployed using the Serverless framework).
They used AWS Lambda for everything – “from parsing the web to writing Slack bots; from batch resizing hundreds of thousands of photos in parallel to batch transcoding hundreds of thousands of videos.”
Serverless technology is still fairly new and uncharted territory for the majority of technology companies, but all the early adopters that have embraced it, are very happy with their choice.
These 3 case studies above are clear indicators of how switching to serverless can save you a ton of money. At the same time, serverless isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” and the experiences with cost reduction might vary based on the application type. If you have your story to share, just let us know in the comments below!
NB: if you want to optimize your costs and application performance even further, make sure you check out Dashbird!
In this article, we’re covering 4 tips for AWS Lambda optimization for production. Covering error handling, memory provisioning, monitoring, performance, and more.
In this article we’ll go through the ins and outs of AWS Lambda pricing model, how it works, what additional charges you might be looking at and what’s in the fine print.
Dashbird was born out of our own need for an enhanced serverless debugging and monitoring tool, and we take pride in being developers.
Dashbird gives us a simple and easy to use tool to have peace of mind and know that all of our Serverless functions are running correctly. We are instantly aware now if there’s a problem. We love the fact that we have enough information in the Slack notification itself to take appropriate action immediately and know exactly where the issue occurred.
Thanks to Dashbird the time to discover the occurrence of an issue reduced from 2-4 hours to a matter of seconds or minutes. It also means that hundreds of dollars are saved every month.
Great onboarding: it takes just a couple of minutes to connect an AWS account to an organization in Dashbird. The UI is clean and gives a good overview of what is happening with the Lambdas and API Gateways in the account.
I mean, it is just extremely time-saving. It’s so efficient! I don’t think it’s an exaggeration or dramatic to say that Dashbird has been a lifesaver for us.
Dashbird provides an easier interface to monitor and debug problems with our Lambdas. Relevant logs are simple to find and view. Dashbird’s support has been good, and they take product suggestions with grace.
Great UI. Easy to navigate through CloudWatch logs. Simple setup.
Dashbird helped us refine the size of our Lambdas, resulting in significantly reduced costs. We have Dashbird alert us in seconds via email when any of our functions behaves abnormally. Their app immediately makes the cause and severity of errors obvious.