One key aspect of Cloud Computing is economics. That is$,$ the question of whether Cloud Computing is a costeffective endeavor. FaaS is $$ideal$$ for short and asynchronous computations, such as the creation of a thumbnail for each

image file that is uploaded to an object store $($e$.$g$.,$ Amazon S$3),$ but not for all applications.

Depending on the application, it would pay off to use a classical virtual machine $($VM$).$ To better understand this, it is

enlightening to perform a simple break$-$even analysis of the cost between a FaaS offering $($e$.$g$.,$ AWS Lambda$)$ against a VM

$($e$.$g$.,$ an EC$2$ instance$)$:

As a use case, pretend to be a payment microservice where each payment request takes around $250$ms of CPU time and

consumes $64$MB of RAM on average. Now assume the following hardware specs:

Function VM nano instance

$$ $$0\mathrm{.}20$ per $1$ million invocations

$$ $$0\mathrm{.}0000166667$ for every GB$-$second

$1$ vCPU and $0\mathrm{.}5$GB RAM

$$ $$0\mathrm{.}0058$ per hour

Now compute how many requests per day would be necessary to break even. Under low traffic conditions, which technology is

the cheapest? Why?