I just realised that I was paying almost $100 a month for things I'm now getting for almost free by just choosing alternative providers like Digitalocean, Cloudflare, etc.
- For example AWS charges 50 cents per DNS zone. I have had a lot of domains in route 53 (it was part of a setup script) which added almost $25 to my bill each month. I moved all my domain to DO and it's $0 now
- Then even with S3 things start to add up quickly. Cost associated with data storage and bandwidth is insane compared to spaces which is $5 flat and I've never exceed what comes in it.
- Most expensive were the EBS snapshots or something. I have been AWS for god knows how long and there were just too many snapshots (AMIs) that were there. Don't think you can download/upload then but they started adding quite on my bill.
- Load balancer also adds like $2 or $5 or something per instance if I remember correctly. Not sure what it is now.
Anyway point being if you are a solo dev and you're not too careful about costs (read lazy), AWS bill can be a good chunk of change per month .
And you won't feel like optimizing this either, because now you have tools and processes that depends on this behavior.
Seems easier to me to do this via regular Lambdas instead, but also save the data as an automatic cache for some amount of time. S3 can clean it out automatically. So your lambda will either fetch the cached version or compute it for you upon request.
Storage is much cheaper than processing, that's for sure.
Lambda also has the limitation that it can't work with outputs greater than 6 MB and those outputs cannot be streamed - the entire content needs to be prepared before any of it can reach the caller.
I don't think of this as a replacement for direct to Lambda or API Gateway based solutions. Rather, when you need to be able to modify what an existing, possibly difficult to modify, application sees when it talks to S3.
