Amazon Lambda to Autoscale Background Work

Many hours have been spent optimizing the cost background work. Iron.io has Iron Worker that scales up when a job is submitted, HireFire spins up and down Heroku Dynos and AWS has Autoscale groups for EC2 instances.

Now Amazon Lambda’s joining the party. Only supporting node.js for the time being, this service magically autoscales based on size of whatever queue is feeding it. It responds to a new entry into an empty queue within milliseconds and is extremely cost efficient.

A part of me feels for the hundreds of companies that rolled out their own scalable backend only to see this deprecate all that work overnight. I would know, I worked on one.