Priceless: An examination of Serverless Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) pricing models

Abstract

Serverless Functions-as-a-Service providers have grown in their offering since inception a decade ago, with a myriad of new functionalities offered to end-users. These new features have also brought new, varied and at times complex pricing models that differ between providers. In this paper, we present Priceless, a detailed examination of the current state of the art of FaaS features, and their pricing models. We then perform a comparative price analysis of running example workloads across AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions. Our work finds significant cost differences both cross-provider, but also, cross-region within the provider. We find that AWS is the cheapest overall to run functions on, with Microsoft Azure being the most expensive for equivalent workloads.