[daenz]

They have a feature called "provisioned concurrency" where basically one "instance" of your lambda (or however many you want to configure) stays running warm, so that it can handle requests quickly.

I know it defeats the conceptual purpose of serverless, but it's a nice workaround while cloud platforms work on mitigating the cold start problem.

[andrew_]

That'll also cost you $$$$ and takes any provisioned lambda out of the free tier. Also note that only your specified number of instances will stay warm, meaning if your lambda needs to scale up, you risk slow cold starts on additional instances outside of the number you provisioned. You could specify the number of reserved concurrent images (limiting the number that run) but that also costs money and will eat int your quota.

Using containers for lambda is generally a bad idea for anything TypeScript/JavaScript that handles a realtime request - you just can't beat the speed of a single JavaScript file (compiled, in the case of TS). AWS CDK now ships with the NodeJSFunction as well, which makes generating those a breeze with ESBuild.

[daenz]

It cost me like $3 a month to get benefit from it. For what it's worth I don't use it for synchronous web requests.

[onphonenow]

I've had some pretty good luck sliming things down as well. That's a win win usually for even non-lambda cases (trying things like docker-slim / switching stuff to go that needs a quick response).

That said, the $2-5/month is fine as well for some cases.

[catlifeonmars]

It’s nice to have that dial. Running lambda with provisioned concurrency is still a very managed experience: much different than running a container cluster.