Infrastructure Cost Comparison of Running Web Applications in the Cloud Using AWS Lambda and Monolithic and Microservice Architectures

TLDR

Large Internet companies deploy applications as microservices in the cloud, but the resulting infrastructure costs are a major concern. The study aims to compare infrastructure costs of a web application across monolithic, customer‑managed microservice, and provider‑managed microservice deployments. The authors evaluate the three deployment scenarios using identical scalable workloads and also discuss the implementation and deployment challenges encountered with microservices. Results show that microservice deployments cut infrastructure costs relative to monolithic architectures, with provider‑managed microservices achieving reductions of 70 % or more.

Abstract

Large Internet companies like Amazon, Netflix, and LinkedIn are using the microservice architecture pattern to deploy large applications in the cloud as a set of small services that can be developed, tested, deployed, scaled, operated and upgraded independently. However, aside from gaining agility, independent development, and scalability, infrastructure costs are a major concern for companies adopting this pattern. This paper presents a cost comparison of a web application developed and deployed using the same scalable scenarios with three different approaches: 1) a monolithic architecture, 2) a microservice architecture operated by the cloud customer, and 3) a microservice architecture operated by the cloud provider. Test results show that microservices can help reduce infrastructure costs in comparison to standard monolithic architectures. Moreover, the use of services specifically designed to deploy and scale microservices reduces infrastructure costs by 70% or more. Lastly, we also describe the challenges we faced while implementing and deploying microservice applications.