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AWS Batch vs AWS Lambda: What are the differences?
Developers describe AWS Batch as "Fully Managed Batch Processing at Any Scale". It enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. It dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources (e.g., CPU or memory optimized instances) based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs submitted. On the other hand, AWS Lambda is detailed as "Automatically run code in response to modifications to objects in Amazon S3 buckets, messages in Kinesis streams, or updates in DynamoDB". AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.
AWS Batch and AWS Lambda belong to "Serverless / Task Processing" category of the tech stack.
When adding a new feature to Checkly rearchitecting some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda . The short story:
- Developer Experience trumps everything.
- AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impact not only your wallet.
- If you need geographic spread, AWS is lonely at the top.
Recently, I was doing a brainstorm at a startup here in Berlin on the future of their infrastructure. They were ready to move on from their initial, almost 100% Ec2 + Chef based setup. Everything was on the table. But we crossed out a lot quite quickly:
- Pure, uncut, self hosted Kubernetes — way too much complexity
- Managed Kubernetes in various flavors — still too much complexity
- Zeit — Maybe, but no Docker support
- Elastic Beanstalk — Maybe, bit old but does the job
- Heroku
- Lambda
It became clear a mix of PaaS and FaaS was the way to go. What a surprise! That is exactly what I use for Checkly! But when do you pick which model?
I chopped that question up into the following categories:
- Developer Experience / DX 🤓
- Ops Experience / OX 🐂 (?)
- Cost 💵
- Lock in 🔐
Read the full post linked below for all details
Pros of AWS Batch
- Containerized3
- Scalable3
Pros of AWS Lambda
- No infrastructure128
- Cheap82
- Quick69
- Stateless58
- No deploy, no server, great sleep47
- AWS Lambda went down taking many sites with it9
- Easy to deploy6
- Extensive API6
- Auto scale and cost effective6
- Event Driven Governance6
- VPC Support5
- Integrated with various AWS services3
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Cons of AWS Batch
- More overhead than lambda2
- Image management1
Cons of AWS Lambda
- Cant execute ruby or go5
- Compute time limited1
- Can't execute PHP w/o significant effort0