Of interest:<p>The following real life scenario below portrays an administrative API layer that runs in EC2, and how it compares to what the raw hardware costs would be in Lambda.  It purposefully excludes anything to do with requests (CloudFront+ELB for EC2 and API Gateway for Labmda).<p>EC2 scenario:
2 c3.large instances, general purpose 15GB SSD (need two for HA, span AZs)
1 Yr All upfront reserved pricing on both instances<p>Lambda scenario:
1042 memory size
Workload running on EC2:
16000 requests a day to an endpt. 200 ms ave = 3200000 ms total<p>3200000 &#x2F; 100 ms = 32000 segments of 100 ms<p>EC2 Cost:
1084(yr)&#x2F;365 = $2.96986301369863&#x2F;day<p>Lambda Cost:
32000 *  0.000001667 = $0.053344&#x2F;day<p>The cost difference is so large because this workload is not a very high EC2 utilization scenario.  We need extra servers for multi AZ HA and to handle bursts. Lambda handles both of these for you.<p>This also does not include the huge costs savings of no server management (security patches etc) that go into EC2 or Docker containers.