[cddotdotslash]

It's still insanely cheap. You could have millions of executions per month and only pay $0.50. But if you needed to, it could scale up to billions of invocation nearly instantly, something a standard server would have trouble doing as easily as Lambda does.

[markonen]

Then again, you are doing the hacks you describe because it is not scaling up nearly instantly. The cold start delays are not only an issue when scaling from zero to one, they hit you whenever you scale the capacity up.

[aspyker]

This. I continue to hear about hacks of people running ping to keep a single instance warm. But that doesn't cover periodic changes in capacity needs nor spikes. I would think to avoid cold starts all together you'd need a pinger that sent exactly the load difference between peak load and current load. I would love to hear if anyone is keeping Lambdas warm at more than n=1 capacity.

[Tehnix]

>if anyone is keeping Lambdas warm at more than n=1 capacity

There are various ways to do it, but I feel that it's a very suboptimal solution, and it still won't guarentee no cold starts happen.

I've personally come to the conclusion, that lambda is very nice for anything non-latency sensitive. We are still using it to great effect for e.g. processing incoming IoT data samples, which can vary quite a lot, but only happens in the backend, and nobody will care if it's 1-2 seconds delayed.