The problem wasn't between the cloud and self hosting - the problem was they had stateful code that didn't scale to thousands of requests for different clients. So they are bringing up new instances every invocation.
The same 3s runtime startup cost (and need for more hardware) would happen if they were running their own servers.
Would the actual costs have been less, the same, or more, running on their own hardware? Processes can take longer running on your own hardware, but still have a lower TCO.
Possibly - the advantage of cloud is you don't need to provision for your peak load, it scales with usage from a few requests a day, to millions a second for an hour a day. If your usage is lumpy or growing fast then paying 2-3 times more than the cost of your own hardware can be cheaper.
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The problem wasn't between the cloud and self hosting - the problem was they had stateful code that didn't scale to thousands of requests for different clients. So they are bringing up new instances every invocation.
The same 3s runtime startup cost (and need for more hardware) would happen if they were running their own servers.
Would the actual costs have been less, the same, or more, running on their own hardware? Processes can take longer running on your own hardware, but still have a lower TCO.
Possibly - the advantage of cloud is you don't need to provision for your peak load, it scales with usage from a few requests a day, to millions a second for an hour a day. If your usage is lumpy or growing fast then paying 2-3 times more than the cost of your own hardware can be cheaper.