AWS Lambda

What hackers pick instead

• Cloudflare WorkersCheap, globally distributed serverless compute that scales from zero with almost no maintenance, though its unique runtime raises lock-in concerns and access controls are coarse.190recommend
• Cloudflare Pages and WorkersPeople recommend it for frictionless static site deployment on Cloudflare's edge and light server-side code via Workers, with one critic finding the documentation unclear.6recommend
• Cloudflare Python WorkersPeople welcome finally getting Python support on Cloudflare Workers, with no extra charge unlike SnapStart. Caveat: strict library limits and architecture concerns recur.6recommend
• Deno DeployPraised for a generous free tier and as a go-to host for new TypeScript projects; critics say it has become clunky and worry about how long products are supported.5recommend
• Telegram ServerlessFree serverless platform that comes with a SQLite database built in, which people praise. Critics say it lacks secrets management and other developer features.5recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 167 comments. Each links to the original.

1. 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.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Python Workers redux: fast cold starts, packages, and a uv-first workflow”

2. 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.

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”

3. 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.

   Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “JDK 27 G1/Parallel/Serial GC Changes”

4. The only downside of this is that the response time takes about 3 extra seconds since it uses a cold start

   Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone”

5. Lambda seemed more expensive for CPU heavy workloads since you're stuck with certain CPU:mem ratios

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Almost Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years”

6. You don't need to do anything. It just runs as many instances of the Lambda as needed for you.

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”

7. They're useful and easily cheaper almost anywhere you have sparse compute or RAM requirements

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”

8. Lambdas, as long as they don't do work, scale unbelievably well and are unbelievably cheap.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “AWS Webhook Serverless Ingestion”

9. we whip up a Lambda, hook it up to API Gateway, and be up and running in a couple of hours.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “AWS is 10x slower than a dedicated server for the same price [video]”

10. it scales beautifully while being mostly hands-free and easy to maintain with a small team

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”

11. Limited running time (15 min), we support up to 4 hours (we can run longer if needed)

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “How We Run Firecracker VMs Inside EC2 and Start Browsers in <1s”

12. For work use, I suspect lambdas would be cheaper and avoid a ton of maintenance junk.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “OpenCode 2.0”

13. Scale down to actual 0, really easy edge distribution, stupidly simple to deploy to.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Python Workers redux: fast cold starts, packages, and a uv-first workflow”

14. There are too many weird limitations: request and response sizes, timeouts, etc.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left”

15. the cold start criticism is fair but for heavy workloads usually isn't an issue

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left”

16. Lambda made things even easier (at the expense of needing new architectures).

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars”

17. Disappointed by the NodeJS-only requirement and the 128 req/env/sec ceiling.

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”

18. AWS lambda seemed to me the most impressively simple and inexpensive product

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left”

19. 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

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”

20. My biggest gripe with this is async tasks where the app does numerous hijinks to avoid a 10 minute lambda processing timeout.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Don't rent the cloud, own instead”

21. Their entire business model is for them to capture you while your load is light and then when you scale the price goes up.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left”

22. AWS heavily pushes a complex lambda solution stringing together as many chargeable AWS services as possible

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Tokenomics: Quantifying Where Tokens Are Used in Agentic Software Engineering”

23. They literally used lambdas and REST calls where anyone sane would have done it in one process

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Modular monolith and microservices: Modularity is what matters”

24. AWS Lambda gives you the isolation and autoscaling for free which is ideal for spiky stateless work like screenshots.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “How We Run Firecracker VMs Inside EC2 and Start Browsers in <1s”

25. I think they are good options for personal projects until it reaches a scale where costs really start to matter.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Show HN: Geoguess Lite – open-source, subscription free GeoGuessr alternative”

26. Things such as AWS cognito, lambda elastic beanstalk, SQS can make it completely uneconomical to do multicloud.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “AWS data center outage hits trading on Fanduel, Coinbase”

27. You can try running on cloudflare workers or Amazon lambda, which have big IP pools that continually churn.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account”

28. Then i had it incorporate some lambda functions for editing and administrative functions for the site.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Show HN: Vibe Coding a static site on a $25 Walmart Phone”

29. The best way of "unpinning" those ratios for many ephemeral workloads is to use Lambda/FaaS, not EC2.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis”

30. So long as you don't count >2 orders of magnitude difference in scaleup time as particularly special

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”

31. there's no free lunch and Lambda is actually a great service for these tasks, all things considered

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”

32. I've deployed Rust binaries to both Lambda and Fargate in AWS and they've been very performant.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “If AI Writes Your Code, Why Use Python?”

33. served millions of page views for next to nothing because most pages were already in the cache

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all”

34. agree, unfortunately in practice it's more common to throw the api behind k8s with containers

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”

35. The tenant isolation feature (which is also fairly) new was a killer feature for us though!

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “How we run untrusted code in Langfuse (OSS) and why we picked lambda”

36. AWS Lambda does not collect any additional data on free tier usage compared to paid usage

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day”

37. This new AWS offering allows concurrent connections, and CPU billing vs wall clock time.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”

38. FaaS like Cloudflare Workers and AWS Lambda which fit fairly well with the requirements

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Tokens too cheap to meter”

39. Also everything gets harder in a lambda, packages/binaries, logging, monitoring, etc.

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”

40. Finally. The need of API gateway + lambda combo even for POCs was almost cliche.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”