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by joshstrange 850 days ago
Very odd that AWS Lambda/Google Cloud Functions weren't tested. Those CF numbers are impressive though, they beat Lambda cold start by a mile.
3 comments

They’re barely comparable in what they do, tradeoffs and limitations. I’ve found that a mix of Cloudflare (for the user interactive parts) and cloud functions (gcp) for more backend ish is a good combo
They always will; starting an Isolate in v8 will always beat a Docker or VM start. They only work with Javascript, but if you're okay with that, then you will have tiny cold start times.
Indeed. Or using WebAssembly. In fact, Wasm cold startup times beat Javascript v8 isolate startup times by a significant margin!
> They always will; starting an Isolate in v8 will always beat a Docker or VM start.

Is that the case though? AWS is upfront in how their nodejs lambdas being the preferred choice for low overhead, low latency, millisecond workloads, and as they also control the runtime I'd be surprised if they followed the naive path you're implying of just running nodejs instances in a dumb VM.

Hell, didn't AWS just updated the way they handled JVM lambdas to basically not charge for their preemptive starts and thus make them look as performant as nodejs ones?

Maybe next time