Reduce you AWS bill by 10% with this one easy trick, Cloud Economists Hate it

On Thursday, the UK did what UKs are want to do lately. They used Brexit to draw fresh criticisms over seemingly simple tasks. This week was the Parliament Website Edition. The surge of traffic of people wanting up to the minute signature counts crippled their site. My friend James Beswick created a cool application to demonstrate how to properly build a web application that scales dynamically with the request load. While I consider James a friend, his treachery cannot go unmentioned. James committed the most unforgivable of serverlessing crimes; he wrote more code than he needed to and now owns more stuff than he needs to provide the same amount of value.

A quick overview of James' architecture looks like this:

(1) A request comes in to API Gateway, and is proxied to AWS Lambda, (2) AWS Lambda reads the appropriate values from a DynamoDB Table, (3) then the Lambda Function returns the information to the client.

Now that API Gateway supports direct integration with AWS Services, we can eliminate the Lambda completely. and create an architecture that looks more like this:

Without a Lambda Function getting in the way, we see improved performance for our clients​

Latency with Lambda: 
  min: 168.1
  max: 3314.7
  median 242.6
  p95: 336.1
  p99 544.8
Latency without Lambda:
  min: 33.7
  max: 4432
  median: 45
  p95: 86.2
  p99: 886.1

But a far more compelling argument for the simpler architecture is cost. Given the following pricing guides from AWS and our hypothetical scenario, we see a non-trivial cost savings by eliminating Lambda.

API Gateway:
  $3.50/Million requests
  $0.020/hr for 0.5GB Cache on Deployment Stage
Lambda:
  $2.08*10^-7 per 100ms of request time on a 128MB Function
DynamoDB:
  $1.25/Million Writes
  $0.25/Million Reads

If we assume our application will receive 10M requests in the first 24 hours (0.5 Million votes cast and 9.5 Million page refreshes) and our API caches read requests for 5 seconds before the TTL expires. The Lambda-based architecture costs about $41.13 for the first 24 hours, the Lambdaless architecture costs about $36.16 over the same period.

This is where a less scrupulous evangelist would offer to help you eliminate all of your Lambda Functions for 'moderate' consulting fee. But, if we take a closer look we see that by simply enabling the API Gateway Cache on the Deployment Stage, the Dynamo Table RCU cost is almost completely eliminated and offsets the price of the Lambda. No huge refactoring required, no unfamiliar integration changes, just checking one box reduces you AWS Bill by 10%