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Which is Cheaper: Serverless or Servers?
Taking a simplified look at the costs of running workloads on common AWS compute services. TL;DR? “It depends”.
Whether you are still learning the basics of cloud computing, perhaps setting up your first serious pet project, or if you are deep into traditional IT operations, surely you have contemplated:
What is the cheaper option between classic infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) options like AWS EC2 and managed hybrid options like AWS Fargate or even fully serverless options like AWS Lambda?
In short: It’s complicated, and I’ll explain some of why that is, while we try to get some kind of answer to the question.
Please note that the products, services, prices and so on are AWS-specific but I would estimate that there are similar strategies and reasonings for Azure, Google and others as well.
I’ve prepared a Google Spreadsheet that you can copy. We will be using it throughout the article—feel free to make your own copy of it! You can certainly compare more than serverless versus servers with it if you want.
Basic recap of trade-offs
When it comes to the fundamentals of how the compute options differ from each other, I will relay it to others to discuss those particulars.
However, we can think of the critical trade-offs like this:
- EC2 offers predictable pricing and performance. Because it’s close to being bare metal, you can do most of the things you’d want from a computer, making it very flexible. However, there is a fair deal of management you need to do and you have to pay per minute or hour as it’s always on until you turn it off (or something bad happens!).
- Fargate offers the hands-off “serverless-ish” experience and runs on container images, so anything you can put in a container image is basically able to run on Fargate. You pay per request, on the whole, but you do need additional management and infrastructure for Fargate (not necessarily true for competing options in other clouds). Thus, Fargate offers…
