can something like http://slither.io be built on lambda/portkey, or would the updates kill the db ?

wouldn’t you need server->clients push capabilities for that?

That would need some lifting to make it palatable but AWS IoT allows to bridge websockets and lambda

which sounds interesting, should look into it

correct me if I'm reading https://aws.amazon.com/iot-platform/pricing/ wrong ... $5 / million msgs is expensive if a server is sending out updates 10-times-per-second, for an hour, to a server with 1000 connections, that becomes: 10 60 60 * 1000 / 1000000 = 36 million msgs, which would be $180.00 / hour

better off running ec2 servers then

lambda is not a panacea and something like running game servers that require keeping much state on the server side, is better with traditional servers

1000 websocket connections is not much for a simple http-kit clojure backend

yup