[booi]

This is definitely an issue especially with infrequently accessed functions but I've seen cold start issues regardless. I assume some scaling events will cause cold starts (measured in seconds).

There's a good argument to go with packaged code instead of containers if you can manage the development complication and versioning (cold starts measured in milliseconds).

[cebert]

My team owns a Node 14 JS lambda application that is completely serverless. We’re focused on keeping our lambdas small with single responsibilities and leverage lambda layers for anything common across multiple lambdas. Cold starts are a concern, but is very negligible (< 100ms tops) and unnoticed by our client apps. We host all of our static web and JS assets via Cloud Front so they load quickly. If a user happened to visit our site when a lambda incurred a cold start, it’s not perceptible. We were much more worried initially about cold starts than it turned out we needed to be. Keeping lambdas small, picking a good language for the job, and leveraging lambda layers help minimize this a lot.