Amazon CloudFront vs Lambda Comparison

A

Why choose Amazon CloudFront

• Has a free plan (Lambda does not)
• Higher Integration score (9/10 vs 5/10)
• Higher Customization score (9/10 vs 6/10)
• Better fit for small business (5/10 vs 3/10)

Why choose Lambda

• Higher Ease of Use score (6/10 vs 5/10)
• Includes Dedicated Servers, which Amazon CloudFront lacks

A

Amazon CloudFront

Pros

• The network is very large, with more than 750 PoPs plus over 1,140 PoPs embedded inside ISP networks.
• Data transfer from AWS origins such as S3 and EC2 to CloudFront costs nothing, which lowers costs for workloads hosted on AWS.
• Flat-rate plans start at $15 a month with no overage charges, which makes bills predictable.
• It has strong compliance coverage, including PCI-DSS Level 1, HIPAA, SOC, ISO and FedRAMP Moderate.
• Two tiers of edge compute are available: CloudFront Functions at $0.10 per million invocations and Lambda@Edge for heavier code.

Cons

• G2 and Capterra reviewers report complex configuration and a steep learning curve for people new to AWS.
• Capterra-network reviewers rate customer support poorly, around 3.4 out of 5.
• Flat-rate plans lack some features, such as real-time logs, dedicated IP SSL and continuous deployment, and going over the allowance reduces performance.
• Dedicated IP SSL at $600 a month and Anycast Static IPs at $3,000 a month are expensive extras.
• Users on AWS re:Post and GitHub report cache invalidations that occasionally hang for hours or time out during deploys.

Lambda

Pros

• A wide GPU range, from $0.69 per hour V100-class cards to B200, suits both small experiments and large training runs.
• A December 2025 comparison reports no egress or data transfer fees, which helps when moving large datasets in and out.
• Lambda Stack images come with PyTorch, CUDA and drivers preinstalled, so ML engineers can start training soon after launch.
• SemiAnalysis testing found full expected interconnect bandwidth and strong health checks on Slurm clusters.
• Lambda's trust page lists SOC 2 Type II, and a trust portal provides the report and pentest results on request.

Cons

• Popular GPUs often sell out on demand, according to several reviews.
• The new list prices from November 2026 are well above the H100 rates of around $2.99 reported in 2025.
• Kubernetes and Slurm need Lambda engineers to set up, and SemiAnalysis rated the console and onboarding as immature.
• There is no CDN, managed databases, serverless functions or general web hosting, and object storage was still in development.
• Lambda has no official Terraform provider or CLI documented, only community Terraform providers.