Lately, I’ve been paying quite a bit of attention to AWS Lambda.

Lambda is an Amazon Web Service designed to run small pieces of code in response to external stimuli (an endpoint is hit, a document is inserted into a database, etc…). The beautiful thing about Lambda is that your code is designed to run once, and you’re only charged for the amount of time your code is running.

A Node.js Script

To make things a little more concrete, let’s talk about my first baby-steps into working with Lambda.

I have a script-based tool that automates Bitcoin lending on the Poloniex exchange. Pre-Lambda, I implemented this tool as a Node.js script that spun up a local server, and executed a job every 15 minutes to “do stuff” (💸 💸 💸).

I wanted to move this script off of my local machine (mostly so I could close my laptop at night), so I began investigating my hosting and pricing options. On the low end of things, I could spin up a small DigitalOcean droplet for five dollars per month. Not bad, but I knew I’d be unnecessarily paying for quite a bit of idle server time.

I even considered buying a Raspberry PI for around forty dollars. I figured the upfront-costs of buying the device would be payed for within a year. After that initial investment, the power requirements would be negligible.

Meets AWS Lambda

Finally, I found Lambda. I quickly and painlessly modified my Node script to run once, manually deployed it to Lambda, and added a schedule trigger to run my script once every fifteen minutes.

Fast forward past a couple hours of fiddling and my script was working!

After monitoring my script for several days, I noticed that it took between one to two seconds to execute, on average. I added an execution hard-stop duration of three seconds to my Lambda function. With that, I knew that I would be charged for, at most, three seconds of up-time every fifteen minutes.

Using that data and Lambda’s pricing sheet, I calculated that at three seconds per execution with an execution every fifteen minutes, the yearly cost for running my script was, at most, at just under twenty two cents zero dollars.

I was shocked. $0.22/year! Thanks to Lambda’s free tier, hosting my script was free! Comparing that to DigitalOcean’s $60/year, or a Raspberry PI’s upfront cost of $40+ dollars, I had a clear winner.

Looking Forward

My first introduction to AWS Lambda left me impressed. Further research has left me even more excited. The possibilities of an scalable on-demand, event-driven infrastructure seem very attractive.

While I’m not totally re-assessing my software development stack, I’m definitely making a little room for Lambda. I’m already thinking about how I could have used it in the past to build more elegantly engineered, and cheaper solutions.