This is a really cute use for Lambda, and a great working example of the kinds of limitations one could expect to bump into.

I was recently asked to evaluate Lambda for use in hosting a bunch of existing web sites, and just from README.md, I'm glad I backed the hell away from that pandora's box before opening it.

Binary uploads are a new APIG feature[1] awaiting Serverless support[2].

Surprised WWW-Authenticate headers aren't passed through. May be possible with custom authorizers[3], though it's extra complexity.

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[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/binary-support-for-api-...

[2] https://github.com/serverless/serverless/issues/2797

[3] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/...

Yeah, that's not really what it's intended for so that makes sense.

Lambdas are great for anything you can wire them up to in AWS, but using them with API Gateway is a pain.

For things like processing files or images as they appear in an S3 bucket, feeding or eating from a queue, replacing CRON jobs or small ETLs, and about a dozen other uses I have found them to be amazing.

This is a perfect use for Lambda (i.e., low-traffic, once-off tasks that don't require a full server), or at least this would be a good fit if not for immaturity issues like missing WWW-Authenticate.

But Lambda at scale is very expensive. A 100 request/second would cost more than $1,500/month, when even a single nano server could easily service that kind of load all by itself.

Back of napkin analysis: https://twitter.com/JamiesonBecker/status/802185522139582464

Lambda is great for tech demos, small or rare loads, triggered tasks, etc. Not so great as part of your core app pipeline.

Is it? I thought S3 would be a better fit.

Hosting a PyPI index on S3 is simpler, but I admire the effort here!

This is cool, but it makes me sad that it has to run on Python 2, as Lambda does not natively support Python 3.

(And no, I'm not counting tricks like calling into the underlying OS' Python 3)