Daniel Broadhurst

WorkflowBuilt on 160 benchmark runs on AWS Lambda

Review your serverless workflow, hop by hop.

Sketch your chain of Lambda functions and how each one hands off to the next. You get the right pattern for every hand-off, the right memory for every function, what it does to latency and cost, and a decision record to take back to your team.

  1. 1 Sketch the chain
  2. 2 Mark each hand-off's needs
  3. 3 Set traffic and priority
  4. 4 Take away the ADR

1–2 · Your chain

    3 · Traffic and priority

    Traffic
    Otherwise optimise for

    The rules

    A hand-off with several consumers gets EventBridge; one that needs an audit trail gets Step Functions; one that needs retries gets a queue. The rest follow your priority. CPU-bound functions get 512 MB, I/O-bound ones 128 MB. The full reasoning is inthe decision tool.

    The estimates

    Hand-off time is the measured delay each pattern adds over a direct call. CPU-bound run times follow the measured memory curve; I/O-bound ones don't change. Cost is Lambda compute and requests plus SQS ($0.40), EventBridge ($1) and Step Functions ($25) per million hand-offs, at AWS list prices.

    The limits

    Measured on AWS, Node.js, linear chains up to 50 concurrent runs and warm infrastructure. Treat the numbers as a guide to the size of each trade-off, not a quote. Nothing you enter leaves your browser; the share link carries it in the URL.