# AWS Lambda 84 Hacker News commenters recommended AWS Lambda and 61 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 6 years (5 owners). **Verdict:** Recommended for scaling spiky, stateless work with little setup, since it autoscales from zero and needs little maintenance. Main caveat: cold starts add latency, and costs can rise at scale. ## Why people recommend it - Scales from zero automatically (5 comments): "There's something really nice about not needing to patch anything for years because all you're using is the Python stdlib and scaling from zero to many, many thousands with no added effort." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239257)) "You don't need to do anything. It just runs as many instances of the Lambda as needed for you." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50070013)) "Lambdas, as long as they don't do work, scale unbelievably well and are unbelievably cheap." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49191881)) - Little patching and maintenance needed (3 comments): "There's something really nice about not needing to patch anything for years because all you're using is the Python stdlib and scaling from zero to many, many thousands with no added effort." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239257)) "it scales beautifully while being mostly hands-free and easy to maintain with a small team" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50072969)) "For work use, I suspect lambdas would be cheaper and avoid a ton of maintenance junk." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50132206)) - Cheap for sparse or spiky workloads (4 comments): "They're useful and easily cheaper almost anywhere you have sparse compute or RAM requirements" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50070314)) "Lambdas, as long as they don't do work, scale unbelievably well and are unbelievably cheap." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49191881)) "For work use, I suspect lambdas would be cheaper and avoid a ton of maintenance junk." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50132206)) - Quick to set up (4 comments): "Using Lambda (I can't speak for many of the other FaaS platforms) is so straightforward to me that there need to be some strong arguments for hosting code/containers in my projects." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50070270)) "we whip up a Lambda, hook it up to API Gateway, and be up and running in a couple of hours." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061062)) "Scale down to actual 0, really easy edge distribution, stupidly simple to deploy to." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46236623)) ## What people warn about - Cold starts add latency (2 comments): "The only downside of this is that the response time takes about 3 extra seconds since it uses a cold start" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309799)) "the cold start criticism is fair but for heavy workloads usually isn't an issue" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48094621)) - Tight time and size limits (4 comments): "Limited running time (15 min), we support up to 4 hours (we can run longer if needed)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48576935)) "There are too many weird limitations: request and response sizes, timeouts, etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096147)) "Disappointed by the NodeJS-only requirement and the 128 req/env/sec ceiling." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50077138)) - Costly for CPU-heavy or large loads (3 comments): "Lambda seemed more expensive for CPU heavy workloads since you're stuck with certain CPU:mem ratios" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086788)) "Other than some GC issues, meaning we had to give it more memory than we'd otherwise like thereby making them a bit more expensive, it's mostly been fine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49291326)) "Their entire business model is for them to capture you while your load is light and then when you scale the price goes up." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084323)) - Sprawling architectures hard to follow (3 comments): "I am not a fan of them in general, I've seen enough giant webs of lambdas that become impossible to truly understand the full architecture" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50072674)) "AWS heavily pushes a complex lambda solution stringing together as many chargeable AWS services as possible" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431604)) "They literally used lambdas and REST calls where anyone sane would have done it in one process" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45879115)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Cloudflare Workers](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-workers.md): 190 recommend - [Cloudflare Pages and Workers](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-pages-and-workers.md): 6 recommend - [Cloudflare Python Workers](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-python-workers.md): 6 recommend - [Deno Deploy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deno-deploy.md): 5 recommend - [Telegram Serverless](https://hackerapproved.com/p/telegram-serverless.md): 5 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "AWS Lambda", https://hackerapproved.com/p/aws-lambda/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).