[joecot]

How do you deal with the 10+ second cold start times for Lambda when using it in a VPC? Are you pre-warming your lambda functions? Did you open up your RDS instance to the world so you could connect to it from a public lambda network? I know you had to pull some magic, because I've been down that road.

It's been a problem for years and there's been no sign of a solution. Example article from last month: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/lambda-vpc-cold-starts-a-lat...

These are the sorts of problems that turn people off from using serverless architectures.

[kauju]

Your right that the cold start times are not ideal. But you get a huge free request load per month. Put an uptime pinger on it and keep it warm. Or do what I do and write your functions in golang. My average cold start time is around 4 seconds.

For the DB connection you put the lambda in the same vpc that the RDS exists in. Then you open the connection pool and reuse it if its active. Not that a new connection is a big overhead over leveraging an established socket.

Wonder where all this misinformation is coming from on lambda DB access issues.

[sbov]

I know uptime pingers are easy and obvious solutions (I use them myself), but everytime I have to resort to this sort of hack it reminds me of how immature serverless is.

[joecot]

Here's the problem. Uptime pingers work great if you have a low volume service. You keep 1, 2, or maybe 3 instances of the function warm, and you don't have to deal with cold start times. But there's 2 places that idea falls seriously flat.

1. This doesn't work if you were actually trying to build your API as microservices. You might have 60+ functions, some which call each other, and keeping them all warm is not really a good option.

2. Keeping a minimum number of instances warm fails to account for half the point of using serverless architectures: being able to scale. Sure, if you have little to no traffic, you can keep a couple instances warm and be up, but if your app needs to scale to 5 or 10 or more instances to handle bursts of traffic, the surfers who hit that cold start end up dealing with an extremely bad experience.

More importantly, as Lambda gets more popular, uptime pingers get less and less useful because of tragedy of the commons. The reason for needing cold starts at all is that AWS is rotating out instances to be able to keep up with overall demand with limited resourcs. If only a few people are sending heartbeats to their instances, their instances stay in rotation because other people's get rotated out instead. If everyone is sending heartbeat requests, some of them will still end up getting rotated out, and therefore everyone will need to increase the frequency of the heartbeat requests to keep their functions warm. It's not a sustainable solution, and I'm baffled that AWS tacitly promotes it as a resolution to the problem they themselves have caused.

It's been years. AWS needs to fix Lambda VPC cold starts.

[wahnfrieden]

AWS is fixing it by moving to IAM authentication in the serverless ecosystem, rather than network segmentation. Serverless Aurora will support IAM auth at scale via its HTTP query protocol.

Keeping Lambda functions warm is great until you have 2 or more requests hitting the function simultaneously. They won't queue behind the pre-warmed function, they will spin up additional Lambda containers to serve in parallel. Unless you don't expect to get concurrent requests, there's no effective way to pre-warm Lambda functions.

[dpeck]

Have any data on the variance on that 4 second average? That sounds very tolerable on its face.

[jchrisa]

My employer offers FaunaDB with a pay-per-request pricing model. To bypass cold-start lambda issues, I code the app to talk directly to the database. For certain richer functions I might invoke a Lambda, but for basic crud operations the database access control does the trick. And no cold-start issue.

Here's the data model part of my todo app if you want to see queries in the app: https://github.com/fauna/todomvc-fauna-spa/blob/master/src/T...

[joecot]

AWS also has NoSQL cloud solutions, particularly DynamoDB, and maybe SimpleDB if you want to risk building on a someday deprecated service.

Those options work fine, if you were OK with using a NoSQL DB. But what if you wanted to use an actual relational database? For that you pretty much need Lambda in VPC, and it's not really usable because of the cold start issue.

At some point Amazon will release Aurora Serverless[1], giving a serverless option for an on demand relational database. Will that work somehow with Lambda without needing VPC, therefore defeating the cold start issue? What cold start issues we'll it have itself? I guess we'll wait and see for now.

1. https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

[cmjqol]

> My employer offers FaunaDB with a pay-per-request pricing model.

Tried FaunaDB few month ago the latency was beyond 200ms for a simple a read , and beyond 600ms for an insert.

Would not recommend it at this point.

[jchrisa]

We don’t expect you to see that lag. Other users don’t see it or haven’t reported it. What region are you accessing in and how did you generate the result?

[com2kid]

> How do you deal with the 10+ second cold start times for Lambda when using it in a VPC?

And I was complaining about 500ms cold start times on Firebase Functions.

I think I'll stop complaining now.