StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. Background Jobs
  4. Message Queue
  5. AWS Lambda vs Gearman

AWS Lambda vs Gearman

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Gearman
Gearman
Stacks77
Followers144
Votes45
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Stacks26.0K
Followers18.8K
Votes432

AWS Lambda vs Gearman: What are the differences?

# Introduction
When comparing AWS Lambda and Gearman, it’s important to understand the key differences between these two technologies.

1. **Execution Environment**: AWS Lambda provides serverless computing, wherein users upload their code and AWS manages the infrastructure, while Gearman requires dedicated servers to be set up and maintained for distributing tasks and executing functions.
2. **Scaling**: AWS Lambda automatically scales based on the incoming traffic and workload, while with Gearman, users need to manually configure and scale the servers to handle the workload effectively.
3. **Pricing Model**: AWS Lambda operates on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are charged based on the number of requests and the compute time they consume, while Gearman requires upfront investment in servers and infrastructure, making it more capital-intensive.
4. **Supported Languages**: AWS Lambda supports multiple programming languages such as Node.js, Python, Java, etc., while Gearman is more limited in language support, primarily focusing on C, Perl, and PHP.
5. **Integration with Cloud Services**: AWS Lambda seamlessly integrates with other AWS services such as S3, DynamoDB, etc., to build serverless architectures, whereas Gearman lacks tight integration with cloud services and is primarily focused on distributing tasks within a server environment.
6. **Management Complexity**: AWS Lambda abstracts the underlying infrastructure complexities, making it easier to deploy and manage serverless applications, while Gearman requires more manual intervention and configuration, increasing the management complexity.

In Summary, AWS Lambda offers a fully managed, serverless computing solution with automatic scaling, pay-as-you-go pricing, multi-language support, tight cloud service integration, and simplified management compared to Gearman, which requires dedicated servers, manual scaling and configuration, upfront investment, limited language support, and lacks seamless integration with cloud services.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Gearman, AWS Lambda

Tim
Tim

CTO at Checkly Inc.

Sep 18, 2019

Needs adviceonHerokuHerokuAWS LambdaAWS Lambda

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.

The setup

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

357k views357k
Comments
Mark
Mark

Nov 2, 2020

Needs adviceonMicrosoft AzureMicrosoft Azure

Need advice on what platform, systems and tools to use.

Evaluating whether to start a new digital business for which we will need to build a website that handles all traffic. Website only right now. May add smartphone apps later. No desktop app will ever be added. Website to serve various countries and languages. B2B and B2C type customers. Need to handle heavy traffic, be low cost, and scale well.

We are open to either build it on AWS or on Microsoft Azure.

Apologies if I'm leaving out some info. My first post. :) Thanks in advance!

133k views133k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Gearman
Gearman
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda

Gearman allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events.

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.

Open Source It’s free! (in both meanings of the word) Gearman has an active open source community that is easy to get involved with if you need help or want to contribute. Worried about licensing? Gearman is BSD;Multi-language - There are interfaces for a number of languages, and this list is growing. You also have the option to write heterogeneous applications with clients submitting work in one language and workers performing that work in another;Flexible - You are not tied to any specific design pattern. You can quickly put together distributed applications using any model you choose, one of those options being Map/Reduce;Fast - Gearman has a simple protocol and interface with an optimized, and threaded, server written in C/C++ to minimize your application overhead;Embeddable - Since Gearman is fast and lightweight, it is great for applications of all sizes. It is also easy to introduce into existing applications with minimal overhead;No single point of failure - Gearman can not only help scale systems, but can do it in a fault tolerant way;No limits on message size - Gearman supports single messages up to 4gig in size. Need to do something bigger? No problem Gearman can chunk messages;Worried about scaling? - Don’t worry about it with Gearman. Craig’s List, Tumblr, Yelp, Etsy,… discover what others have known for years.
Extend other AWS services with custom logic;Build custom back-end services;Completely Automated Administration;Built-in Fault Tolerance;Automatic Scaling;Integrated Security Model;Bring Your Own Code;Pay Per Use;Flexible Resource Model
Statistics
Stacks
77
Stacks
26.0K
Followers
144
Followers
18.8K
Votes
45
Votes
432
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 11
    Ease of use and very simple APIs
  • 11
    Free
  • 6
    Polyglot
  • 5
    No single point of failure
  • 3
    Scalable
Pros
  • 129
    No infrastructure
  • 83
    Cheap
  • 70
    Quick
  • 59
    Stateless
  • 47
    No deploy, no server, great sleep
Cons
  • 7
    Cant execute ruby or go
  • 3
    Compute time limited
  • 1
    Can't execute PHP w/o significant effort

What are some alternatives to Gearman, AWS Lambda?

Kafka

Kafka

Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ gives your applications a common platform to send and receive messages, and your messages a safe place to live until received.

Celery

Celery

Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.

Amazon SQS

Amazon SQS

Transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available. With SQS, you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available messaging cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

NSQ

NSQ

NSQ is a realtime distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale, handling billions of messages per day. It promotes distributed and decentralized topologies without single points of failure, enabling fault tolerance and high availability coupled with a reliable message delivery guarantee. See features & guarantees.

ActiveMQ

ActiveMQ

Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License.

ZeroMQ

ZeroMQ

The 0MQ lightweight messaging kernel is a library which extends the standard socket interfaces with features traditionally provided by specialised messaging middleware products. 0MQ sockets provide an abstraction of asynchronous message queues, multiple messaging patterns, message filtering (subscriptions), seamless access to multiple transport protocols and more.

Apache NiFi

Apache NiFi

An easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data. It supports powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing, transformation, and system mediation logic.

Azure Functions

Azure Functions

Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems.

Google Cloud Run

Google Cloud Run

A managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. It's serverless by abstracting away all infrastructure management.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase