AWS Lambda vs Azure Functions
A detailed comparison to help you choose between AWS Lambda and Azure Functions.
Quick Verdict
4.1/5
AWS Lambda
0 reviews
4.0/5
Azure Functions
0 reviews
AWS Lambda is rated higher (4.1 vs 4.0). AWS Lambda is the original FaaS service — run code without servers. Supports 15+ runtimes, 1M free requests/month, and integrates deeply with 200+ AWS services. Triggered by S3, DynamoDB, API Gateway, and more. Azure Functions is Microsoft's serverless platform. 1M free executions/month. Durable Functions for long-running workflows. Best integration with .NET, Microsoft 365, and Azure services.
AWS Lambda The original serverless functions service | Azure Functions Microsoft serverless functions for .NET teams | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.1 (0 reviews)✓ | 4.0 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | freemium (pay per request + GB-second; MicroVMs/Managed Instances metered differently) | usage-based |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | AWS developers building event-driven, variable-traffic workloads — webhooks, media processing, scheduled jobs, API backends — who want to stop managing servers entirely | Microsoft/.NET teams building event-driven processing, workflows (Durable Functions), and spiky APIs inside the Azure ecosystem |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ✓ | |
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | All 39 AWS regions / 124 AZs | — |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierapi accessus datacentereu datacenterapac datacenter | free tierapi accessus datacentereu datacenterapac datacenter |
| Visit AWS Lambda → | Visit Azure Functions → | |
AWS Lambda
Pros
- + Zero idle cost with a free tier that covers small products: 1M requests and 400,000 GB-seconds monthly
- + Graviton pricing at $0.0000133334 per GB-second undercuts x86 by roughly 20%
- + Automatic multi-AZ scaling with a 99.95% per-region SLA and no capacity planning
- + Deep event integration across AWS services, with three form factors (Event/Web Functions, MicroVMs)
Cons
- - Per-request and GB-second pricing gets expensive against committed compute at steady high utilization
- - Cold starts — hundreds of milliseconds to seconds depending on runtime — with provisioned concurrency as an extra meter
- - 15-minute execution limit and payload caps make it wrong for long-running batch work
- - AWS-specific event plumbing creates real lock-in; distributed event chains are hard to debug
Azure Functions
Pros
- + Permanent free grant of 1 million executions and 400,000 GB-s per month
- + Trigger/binding integrations cover most Azure and third-party services declaratively
- + Durable Functions for stateful orchestration — the strongest workflow story among serverless platforms
- + Hosting plan ladder (Consumption, Flex, Premium, Dedicated, Container Apps) covers most cost/performance points
- + 99.95% SLA with service credits scaling up to 100% below 95% uptime
Cons
- - Cold starts on Consumption hurt latency-sensitive HTTP workloads
- - Per-instance limits (1.5 GB RAM, 1 core) cap what single functions can do
- - Azure surface area: storage account, monitoring, identity, and networking costs stack up
- - Bindings and Durable Functions abstractions lock integration logic to Azure
- - Premium costs real money whether or not traffic flows (EP1 ~$146/month US rates)
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