Can anyone share their experiences using AWS Lambda in Production?

We gave it a run in prod and abandoned it quickly. We were using it for parallel file processing (S3->lambda for CPU-heavy task->return a few numbers in a JSON).

Last I calculated, it's nearly 5x the cost of comparable t2 on-demand EC2 instances. That can be mitigated if you have spiky traffic where you'd need to turn on several EC2 instances for less than an hour but are stuck paying for the full hour, or if you can scale to zero for extended periods of time.

Critical to us: you don't have the ability to serve concurrent requests from a single lambda worker, so if you're waiting for async IO (e.g. downloading from S3) then you're wasting money you wouldn't be wasting with EC2. You end up with one file per lambda worker, whereas we could handle about five files concurrently on a normal VM because of async IO. -- For us lambda was prohibitively expensive at scale. I suspect a fair number of people reporting significant savings vs EC2 had over-provisioned instances.

It would be interesting if someone made an EC2 image that implemented the Lambda APIs, and handled as many requests as it could, then optionally delegated the overflow to real Lambda. Like "reserved" Lambdas.