AppFog (discontinued) vs. AWS Lambda

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AppFog (discontinued)
Score 6.6 out of 10
N/A
AppFog was a cloud-agnostic application and infrastructure management platform used to manage workloads across on-premises and third-party cloud environments. It has been discontinued.N/A
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
AWS Lambda is a serverless computing platform that lets users run code without provisioning or managing servers. With Lambda, users can run code for virtually any type of app or backend service—all with zero administration. It takes of requirements to run and scale code with high availability.
$NaN
Per 1 ms
Pricing
AppFog (discontinued)AWS Lambda
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
128 MB
$0.0000000021
Per 1 ms
1024 MB
$0.0000000167
Per 1 ms
10240 MB
$0.0000001667
Per 1 ms
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AppFog (discontinued)AWS Lambda
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AppFog (discontinued)AWS Lambda
Features
AppFog (discontinued)AWS Lambda
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
AppFog (discontinued)
6.5
Ratings
21% below category average
AWS Lambda
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability5.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration6.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation7.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication8.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery6.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
AppFog (discontinued)
-
Ratings
AWS Lambda
9.3
Ratings
3% below category average
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings9.50 Ratings
Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
AppFog (discontinued)
-
Ratings
AWS Lambda
6.1
Ratings
4% below category average
Dashboards00 Ratings6.70 Ratings
Standard reports00 Ratings6.50 Ratings
Custom reports00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Function as a Service (FaaS)
Comparison of Function as a Service (FaaS) features of Product A and Product B
AppFog (discontinued)
-
Ratings
AWS Lambda
7.9
Ratings
3% below category average
Programming Language Diversity00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Runtime API Authoring00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Function/Database Integration00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
DevOps Stack Integration00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AppFog (discontinued)AWS Lambda
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
IBM Cloud Functions
IBM Cloud Functions
Score 8.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AppFog (discontinued)AWS Lambda
Likelihood to Recommend
6.6
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AppFog (discontinued)AWS Lambda
Likelihood to Recommend
AppFog is good for academic purposes. It comes in very handy for cloud deployments.
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Scenarios where AWS Lambda is well suited: 1. When we need to run a periodic task few times in a day or every hour, we may deploy it on AWS Lambda so it would not increase load on our server which is handling client requests and at the same time we don't have to pay for AWS Lambda when it is not running. So, overall we only pay for few function invocations. 2. When some compute intensive processing is to be done but the number of requests per unit of time fluctuates. For example, we had deployed an AWS Lambda for processing images into different sizes and storing them on AWS S3 once user uploads them. Now, this is something that may happen few times every hour on a particular day or may not happen even once on other days. To handle this kind of tasks AWS Lambda is a better choice as we don't have to pay for the idle time of the server and also we don't have to worry about scaling when the load is high. Scenarios where AWS Lambda is not appropriate to use: 1. When we expect a large request volume continuously on the server. 2. When we don't want latency even in case of concurrent requests.
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Pros
  • Quick deployment of pre-built virtual machines
  • Some of the virtual machines also are readily available with a pack of softwares
  • Good Stability. Using it as a student, I have never experienced any downtime issues with the projects deployed on AppFog.
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  • AWS Lambda is a welcoming platform, supporting several languages, including Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python, and Ruby. And if you need to deploy a Lambda function in another language, AWS offers a Runtime API for integration.
  • We really appreciate how AWS Lambda is always-on for our functions, with only a brief "cold-start" waiting period the first time a function is called after being dormant.
  • In addition to only generating costs when it's actually being used, AWS Lambda really puts the "serverless" in serverless architecture, offering turnkey scaleability and high availability for our code with zero effort on our part.
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Cons
  • Though it is good and easy for developers, it lacks operational activities and monitoring tools.
  • It is easy to deploy WAR on AppFog with its console but sometimes it can lack on the performance and feasibility.
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  • The UI and Developer experience is not so great. IF you use an abstraction like Serverless Application Model (SAM), things get pretty easy, but it's still AWS UI/DX you're working with after that (which is to say, not their strength).
  • Documentation is always a mixed bag. Sometimes it's just easier to google your specific problem and see how others have solved it. This can be much faster than trying to find an example that may or may not be there in the documentation (which oftentimes has multiple versions and revisions).
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Usability
No answers on this topic
It is very easy to get started with AWS Lambda and create your first function. The user interface makes it easy to add AWS services to be inputs or outputs to the function, meaning it can be configured in many different ways for different needs. This makes it ideal for various scenarios in AWS.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
As this is a product where a great part of errors can be at the source code level, AWS support team doesn't dive that further. I mean they don't evaluate problems more complex related to your code, [which] is totally understandable, but this make[s] debug process more tough and painful.
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Alternatives Considered
Appfog was one of the requirements of our project since it was the fastest growing PAAS provider. Also it was easy to deploy an application with multiple options to choose for the development environment for our application. It was "ALL in ONE."
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It's fine, it works as the others would have, except EC2. We are migrating back to EC2 for dedicated compute because we have scaled to a point where we have consistent traffic. The tradeoff of maintaining infrastructure in-house outweighs the benefits of moving quickly through our roadmap.
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Return on Investment
  • Our project was deployed with good efficiency and easily accessible.
  • The platform was much recommeded across the groups and peers.
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  • We have simplified log fiie ingestion using Lambda functions. The return has been less time worrying about getting logs from source to ingestion; one the process is in place the team is nearly 100% hands off.
  • We have begun taking a more API focused approach by using API Gateway as the interface to business processes and Lambda as the back end compute. Moving away from server based back ends places us on a path to reducing overall spend in compute costs.
  • Lambda functions allow us to easily interface with third party services through APIs. This simplifies access management since the function can be granted permissions and access to the function can be gated with API keys and other authentication methods.
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