@cfleming: btw, did you end up using lambda for the license buying stuff?

@martinklepsch: Yeah, I did. It was a mixture of agony and ecstasy

I love Lambda and Dynamo, but I hate CloudWatch and API gateway.

Haven't used API gateway yet but everyone seems to hate it so already looking forward lol

This has been asked before I think but some more anecdotal knowledge would be interesting: how is startup time? @cfleming

(assuming you used Clojure not ClojureScript)

@martinklepsch: Sorry, fighting a few release-related fires, will get whisky for war tales in a bit.

sure, good luck 👍 congrats again, must be a really big day for you

massive. congrats cfleming !

Thanks guys! It’s been a ton of work to get here, I can’t wait to work on functionality again!

@martinklepsch: I don’t actually know about instance startup time, it’s actually fairly difficult to measure. You do get a total elapsed time in CloudWatch, so if you create a simple Java lambda that doesn’t do anything you could probably test it.

That’s not my main problem though. The biggest pain point is that API gateway has a hard 10-sec timeout for Lambda backends. That sounds like a lot, but I’m getting a lot of timeouts when I access AWS services for the first time. Creating a DynamoDB client, finding a table and loading a single record out of it takes around 7.2 seconds when the instance is cold.

Once it’s warmed up a bit (interestingly, this isn’t true for the second request, more like the third or fourth) it starts to get a lot faster.

that sucks

Yeah

It’s actually not a great fit for occasional requests, which is daft - that seems like its ideal use case.

I actually put Dynamo in the mix to make the lambda idempotent because I was already seeing long timeouts for other services I use (KMS), but they’re faster once Dynamo is loaded first, so it must be some connection to AWS in general that’s taking the time.

not good for occasional web requests, but we're using it as a timer and it's great in that role

@cfleming Are you using DynamoDB? Faraday, or some other interface?

@ricardo: Um, some other interface: Java

@cfleming: The horror.

@ricardo: I washed my hands afterwards, though.

Good, wouldn’t want bad codebase hygene.

CloudWatch is truly pitiful.

Or I am extremely stupid, I guess is the other possibility.