[iamjustlooking]

I commented on a thread a couple weeks ago about Cloud Functions on GCP here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17796893

Eager to test it out we ran thousands of tests attempts with different RAM sizes and I can corroborate this persons findings in regards to the reduction of cold start time from functions with larger RAM allocations and seeming unpredictability of cold start on GCP. I hope with time they will improve cold start times or increase the minimum time for making a function "cold".

[jacques_chester]

From the parts I can see in Knative-land, it's being given a lot of thought. My view is that the biggest improvement to be made is in smarter handling of raw bits. Kubernetes doesn't quite understand disk locality yet and most docker images are less-than-ideally constructed in any case.

[mwcampbell]

What do you find suboptimal about most Docker images? Just the size, or something else?

[jacques_chester]

I wrote several thousand words on the topic a few months (email me for the link).

The gist is: you can make an image easy for developers, or you can make it performant in production, but you cannot have both.

Ease of development typically leads to kitchen-sink images or squashed images, but production performance requires careful attention to the ordering and content of layers.