AWS is all about MVP, MVP, MVP. node.js happens to be a really good fit for this use case.

Most of the Python things I would want to do have slow startup times. Generally I keep my pythons running. But node is super quick to start.

That's an interesting perspective - what's a slow startup time in this context?

A quick back-of-the-envelope test on my machine for both node and python suggest similar (around 100 ms) start up times for the bare environments.

Do you just mean that you'd prefer to use node for smaller jobs anyway?

Django is the problem. Even if I don't trigger the database to connect, the startup costs are noticeable to validate models and load things that won't ever be used.

so maybe lambda its not suitable for things that are less than a few seconds.

I could write python with no django and try to structure things so they don't need database. but then I would have to take input from and put output data back to a queue of some sort.

>> A quick back-of-the-envelope test

and actually python on mine was even faster than node when both are doing nothing. so my assumption was wrong (but its based on mostly using django and all my node stuff is small servers and tools)

» time node noop.js node noop.js 0.04s user 0.01s system 98% cpu 0.045 total

» time python noop.py python noop.py 0.01s user 0.01s system 90% cpu 0.026 total

but importing significant numbers of libraries would be the real test.

the main benefits to lambda would still be:

- scaling for high demand - no cost for idle time

and let's not worry about the micro pennies in startup times

I'd love a feature like this that I could use with pypy. I don't need 100ms billing resolution, but 1s or 1m would be nice.

I guess it is due to the sanboxing issue, which is pretty hard to get right.

I dont think so - the docs suggest you get a full Linux that your code runs on, not just a limited sandbox, one of the blogs mentioned running binary code. So I don't think it is being sandboxed at the language level. Especially as they talked about adding more languages soon.

Yes, the Lambda function is run in an Amazon Linux environment.

I published some explorations of that environment here: http://alestic.com/2014/11/aws-lambda-environment

Let me know in the comments on that article what other commands you'd like to see output for.