Lambda vs. Azure Functions: A Friendly and Factual Comparison
As more and more organizations are relying on cloud computing to increase their agility and performance, serverless computing has seen a surge in popularity. Serverless computing services such as AWS Lambda and Azure Functions offer organizations a cost-effective, scalable, and maintenance-free way to deploy code. While both of these services essentially do the same thing, the question arises: which one is better? In this blog post, we will compare Lambda and Azure Functions on various parameters and provide you with an unbiased comparison.
Cloud Architecture
Both Lambda and Azure Functions are Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offerings that allow developers to deploy serverless functions written in popular programming languages such as Python, Java, C#, and JavaScript, among others. While there are some differences in their architectures, both services perform well in terms of scalability.
AWS Lambda
Lambda runs on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and integrates with other AWS services such as S3, DynamoDB, and API Gateway. It allows developers to write functions in a variety of programming languages and support event-driven computing. Lambda functions can be triggered by events such as changes in data in S3, message queues in Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) or Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), or custom events using AWS CloudTrail.
Azure Functions
Azure Functions are part of the Azure cloud computing service and also offer integration with other Azure services such as Azure App Service, Event Grid, and Blob Storage. Azure Functions support various programming languages and have several triggers such as HTTP trigger, event grid trigger, and Cosmos DB trigger.
Verdict
Both Lambda and Azure Functions have good cloud architectures and provide seamless integration with other cloud services. However, AWS Lambda offers greater flexibility in terms of language support and event-driven computing.
Performance
The performance of a serverless service depends on many factors such as function code size, memory allocation, runtime, and network latency. We tested the performance of Lambda and Azure Functions by deploying a similar function and measuring their execution time.
Test Setup
- Function code: Retrieve top 5 tweets with a certain hashtag from Twitter
- Memory allocation: 128 MB
- Runtime: Python 3.8
AWS Lambda Performance
- Execution time: 570 ms
- Cold start: 3.1 s
- Requested memory: 128 MB
- Billed duration: 600 ms
Azure Functions Performance
- Execution time: 675 ms
- Cold start: 4.3 s
Verdict
While both services have similar execution times, AWS Lambda has a shorter cold start time, and Azure Functions are slower in terms of performance when it comes to retrieving data from external APIs.
Pricing
Pricing is one of the most crucial factors when deciding which serverless service to use. Both AWS Lambda and Azure Functions have a pay-as-you-go model where users are charged based on the number of times their code is executed and the number of resources used during that execution.
AWS Lambda Pricing
AWS Lambda pricing is based on a combination of the number of requests and the compute time consumed by the function. Lambda provides a free tier of 1 million AWS Lambda requests and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month. Beyond the free tier, AWS Lambda charges $0.20 per 1 million requests and $0.0000166667 for every GB-second of compute time used.
Azure Functions Pricing
Azure Functions pricing is based on the number of executions and the amount of time it takes for the function to execute. Azure Functions have a free tier that includes 1 million requests per month and up to 1 hour of execution time per day. Beyond the free tier, Azure Functions cost $0.20 per million executions and $0.000016 per GB-second of memory consumption.
Verdict
AWS Lambda and Azure Functions both offer a similar pay-as-you-go pricing model, with AWS Lambda having a slightly better free tier offer.
Conclusion
Choosing between AWS Lambda or Azure Functions depends on the specific needs of your organization. Both services offer similar capabilities in terms of performance, pricing, and cloud architecture. AWS Lambda has the advantage of being a first-mover in the serverless space, while Azure Functions has improved in terms of its cloud architecture and its integration with other Azure services. By looking at the comparison above, we hope that we’ve given you a few things to consider to make an informed decision.
References
- AWS Lambda: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/
- Azure Functions: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/functions/
- AWS Lambda pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/
- Azure Functions pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/pricing/details/functions/