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Choosing between Lambda functions and activities
Gurmit Teotia edited this page Jan 5, 2020
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Lambda functions and self hosted activities have their own strength. Below table should help you to decide whether Lambda functions or activities (or combination of both) is more suitable for your need1.
Features | Lambda functions | Activities |
---|---|---|
Access to specialized hardware | Not available. In Lambda function you can't access specialized hardware (e.g. GPU) | Available, self hosted activities can be executed on specialized machines or device. |
Cancel the running task | Not available, you can't cancel a running Lambda function | Available, you can cancel a running activity |
Timeout the running task | Available, you can configure the Lambda function to finish within a specific period | Available |
Scalability | Available, out of the box | You have to put the efforts to start/stop additional workers |
Human approvals | Available, Guflow provides intuitive signal API to support human approvals | Available |
Choice of programming languages | You can write the Lambda functions in good number of programming languages | Guflow provides you rich APIs to develop the activities. Hence your first option will be .NET. |
Cost2 | Likely to be low because you will pay only for the time when Lambda functions are executing | Likely to be more because your worker machines(docker or EC2) will be up and running even when there is no active workflow |
Host maintenance | None, AWS takes care of keeping the host, Lambda functions executes on, up to date. | You will be responsible for keeping the EC2 instance or container safe and up to date3 |
- Guflow does not give preference to either Lambda functions or self hosted activities. With same ease you should be able to program Lambda functions and self hosted activities. In fact feel free to mix activities and Lambda functions in same workflow if that is what suites your need.
- You should evaluate cost for your case independently.
- You should evaluate update and upgrade process for EC2 instances or docker images.
Guflow
- Prerequisite
- Installation
-
Workflows
- Creating first workflow
- Registration
- Hosting
- Start workflow
- Schedule activities
- Schedule timers
- Schedule lambda function
- Schedule child workflows
- Lambda functions vs activities
- Workflow input
- Workflow actions
- Signals
- Workflow branches
- Deflow algorithm
- Workflow events
- Query APIs
- Custom polling strategy
- Things to take care of
- Activites
- Unit testing
- Performance & scalability
- Error handling
- Logging
- Debugging
- Tutorial
- Release notes