Pay as you go machine learning inference with AWS Lambda

This post is courtesy of Eitan Sela, Senior Startup Solutions Architect. Many customers want to deploy machine learning models for real-time inference, and pay only for what they use. Using Amazon EC2 instances for real-time inference may not be cost effective to support sporadic inference requests throughout the day. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service with pay-per-use billing. However, ML frameworks like XGBoost are too large to fit into the 250 MB application artifact size limit, or the 512 MB /tmp space limit.