AWS Lambda vs Fastly Compute@Edge
A detailed comparison to help you choose between AWS Lambda and Fastly Compute@Edge.
Quick Verdict
4.1/5
AWS Lambda
0 reviews
3.8/5
Fastly Compute@Edge
0 reviews
AWS Lambda is rated higher (4.1 vs 3.8). 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. Fastly Compute@Edge runs WebAssembly serverless functions at Fastly's edge PoPs globally. Ultra-low latency, near-instant startup, and support for Rust, JavaScript, Go, and other WASM-compiled languages.
 AWS Lambda The original serverless functions service |  Fastly Compute@Edge Serverless on Fastly's programmable CDN edge | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.1 (0 reviews)✓ | 3.8 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | freemium (pay per request + GB-second; MicroVMs/Managed Instances metered differently) | freemium |
| 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 | Latency-sensitive edge logic — personalization, auth, routing, API gateways, streaming — especially for teams already on Fastly's CDN or requiring per-request sandbox isolation |
| 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 | 100+ city-level PoPs across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia/NZ |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierapi accessus datacentereu datacenterapac datacenter | free tierapi accesseu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenter |
| Visit AWS Lambda → | Visit Fastly Compute@Edge → | |
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
Fastly Compute@Edge
Pros
- + Per-request WebAssembly sandboxes with very fast startup — effectively no cold starts
- + Generous free allowances: 10 million requests and 100 million vCPU-milliseconds free every month
- + Billing by requests and vCPU only (duration meter removed for new purchases) rewards efficient code
- + Runs globally on Fastly's 100+ PoP network with HTTP/3, IPv6 and DDoS mitigation included
- + Official SDKs for Rust, JavaScript, Go and C++, plus KV Store, Secret Store, Object Store and Fanout
Cons
- - WASM compilation and capability-based sandboxing add real tooling friction versus mainstream serverless
- - Free-trial state on first deploy, account-type-dependent limits, and two legacy pricing regimes complicate planning
- - Edge state stores use Fastly-specific APIs — no S3-compatible or Redis-compatible interface
- - Outside the official SDK languages, you are a pioneer; long-running workloads do not fit
- - Production use pushes toward a sales conversation rather than pure self-serve
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