[southpolesteve]

We use Lambda and API gateway for all production[1] requests. HTML, Server side rendered JS, API calls. All through lambda. There are some rough edges. We wrote our own framework/deployment tool[2] to fix some of them. AWS has been making lots of improvements too. Many in just the last few months. This setup was much harder to run when we first started a year and a half ago. Overall our team is super happy. It is cheaper and simpler to operate than our previous ec2+Opsworks setup. We get code to production faster and spend more time on actual business problems vs infastructure problems. I also pretty much agree with everything Ben Kehoe said in this article: https://serverless.zone/serverless-vs-paas-and-docker-three-....

[1] www.bustle.com and www.romper.com do a combined XX million unique visitors per month.

[2] https://github.com/bustlelabs/shep

[nchuhoai]

How do you guys deal with potential cold-start issues?

[southpolesteve]

Mostly it is not a big problem for us. Our functions that need to be fast have very high traffic. Our other functions don't need to be that fast. We also have a CDN in front of most things.

That said, we use node. I have heard cold starts are worse for Python (I have no data). I have heard they are near unbearable for Java (JVM startup and all that). We try and minimize external calls outside the main handler. Previous to this update we were packing configs with webpack at deploy time. Some people read them from S3 or dynamo. I don't consider that a good solution. I'll be working this week on Shep 3.0 which will use the new ENV var features.

I have talked to other people who do various hacks to force their functions to be warm. I've looked at doing this and haven't found it necessary yet for our use case.

[cagataygurturk]

We use route53 health checks to invoke API gateway and thus the backend Lambda.