[lentil]

> the 2nd function was taking up over 50% of the concurrent execution limit and new events coming into the front-end would get throttled and in this case thrown out.

It sounds like you already found a great solution for your particular case. But it's also worth mentioning that you can apply per-function concurrency limits, which can be another way to prevent a particular function from consuming too much of the overall concurrency. For anyone who's lambda workload is cheaper than a 27/7 task, that could be a good option.

> Each invocation of the Lambda was authenticating with the GCP SDK before passing the event

I'm curious whether you tried moving the authentication outside of the handler function so it could be reused for multiple events? I've found that can make a huge difference for some use cases.