> At that scale wouldn't it be easier to just build everything out of a few VMs at a cheap service?
I have a handful of AWS Lambda functions with a DynamoDB backend serving hundreds of clients, my bill for the month of April was $0.01.
No, a VM wouldn't cut it.
But you are right that there are certain slots where AWS doesn't make sense: There's one in the lower middle range where you can save a bunch of money by using a VM or two with your own DB servers. And there's the one where you're so big it might actually be worth it to implement the whole stack yourself.
It's a common backend for chat bots (Discord, Matrix, IRC, Telegram).
Basically it takes different inputs and commands and uses different APIs to fetch data based on the input efficiently without the need for web scraping. DynamoDB is used mostly as a cache for common queries so I don't go over API quotas.
Most of the bots are made by me, but with AWS API Gateway I can easily generate API keys for anyone else and keep track of their usage.
I have a handful of AWS Lambda functions with a DynamoDB backend serving hundreds of clients, my bill for the month of April was $0.01.
No, a VM wouldn't cut it.
But you are right that there are certain slots where AWS doesn't make sense: There's one in the lower middle range where you can save a bunch of money by using a VM or two with your own DB servers. And there's the one where you're so big it might actually be worth it to implement the whole stack yourself.