> significantly more expensive per vCPU hour

It's almost exactly the same price as EC2. What you don't get to control is the mix of vCPU and RAM. Lambda ties those two together. For equivalent EC2 instances the cost difference is astronomically small, on the order of pennies per month.

> like transcoding long videos, [...] data analysis, and other compute-heavy tasks

If you aren't breaking these up into multiple smaller independent segments then I would suggest that you're doing this wrong in the first place.

> training a model

You're going to want more than what a basic EC2 instance affords you in this case. The scaling factors and velocity are far less of a factor.

This is a great example of what I meant when I said that a part of the Cloud Tax is it constrains the solution space available to developers. In an era where one can purchase, off-the-shelf, a 256-core machine with terabytes of RAM, developers are still counting megabytes(!) of file sizes due to the constraints of AWS.

It should be obvious that this is not the best answer for all projects.

This article (from Nov. 2022) shows that "utilizing Lambda is preferable until Lambda is utilized about 40 to 50 % of the time"

https://medium.com/life-at-apollo-division/compare-the-cost-...

> If you aren't breaking these up into multiple smaller independent segments then I would suggest that you're doing this wrong in the first place.

Care to elaborate?