Chances are, you've heard one of the main promises of serverless compute: "you only pay for what you use". While convenient when starti

How OnlineOrNot more than halved its AWS bill

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2024-11-01 10:00:05

Chances are, you've heard one of the main promises of serverless compute: "you only pay for what you use". While convenient when starting a new project, once you start to get continuous usage on that compute, you start to realize you're paying a hefty premium for that convenience.

If you're using AWS Lambda like I am, chances are that "for what you use" part isn't completely true either. If your function spends the majority of its time waiting for I/O to complete (fetching external URLs, querying DBs), you're paying a serverless premium mostly for your compute to sit around, waiting for something to do.

My solution to this was to migrate to Cloudflare Workers. With Workers, I went from paying up to 30000ms for a function to wait around while fetching a URL, to paying for the 1.4ms (p99) of CPU time to process the data before and after fetching.

OnlineOrNot is a bootstrapped business that provides status pages with uptime monitoring attached, for software teams. When I started out, it was the 200th alternative uptime monitor for the Internet. To save money on the off-chance no one other than me used it, I built it on AWS Lambda. It did indeed cost nothing while no one was using it.