如何部署 Node.js 代码以在不超过免费部署层的情况下按时间间隔运行

Question

I am trying to deploy a node application that will execute code periodically (I was hoping to execute once every 1-5 minutes). This code will make several API calls to different platforms and route some lightweight json data (mostly text and numbers).

I was hoping to deploy this project using either Heroku, Amazon EC2, or Amazon Lambda and would like to stay within their free tiers and I am not sure how my code will interact with their servers.

If I deploy this code to run using a setTimeout, does this mean that I am requesting the servers to always be "on" and I will essentially be charged for 100% uptime? I could see this being an issue as Heroku only provides 550 free hours per month and Amazon EC2 provides 750 free hours per month.

The code is pretty lightweight and should only be running momentarily so it would be a shame to have a server running 24/7 for only a few seconds of actual usage per day. How can I best deploy this code to run periodically? Is there another service that I can use here?

Also, below is the barebones of what my code would look like. Please let me know if there is something glaringly obvious that I am missing that could be an issue.

const axios = require('axios');
const asana = require('asana');
const { Dropbox } = require('dropbox');

function apiCallOne() {
  ...
}

function apiCallTwo() {
  ...
}

function runMyCode() {
  apiCallOne();
  apiCallTwo();
  ...
}

setTimeout(runMyCode, 1000);

Answer 1

With EC2 you will definitely get charged by uptime of the resource, whether you are using it or not. Although 750 free hours p/month is basically 1 free tier instance p/month.

Now I'd recommend Lambda as it seems a pretty simple code. And with Lambda you have 1M free requests per month and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month. . But Lambda by itself can't run on schedules, you will need to use AWS CloudWatch Events for that.