At its re:Invent kickoff keynote tonight, AWS announced a small but important update to Lambda, its serverless platform, that tackles one of the most common issues with the service. Typically, when a function isn’t used for quite a while, Lambda will shut the virtual machine down — and despite improvements like faster Firecracker microVMs, this still takes a while. Now, with SnapStart, AWS is addressing this by creating snapshots of a customer’s Lambda functions and then simply starting those up without having to go through the usual initialization process.
Cold start times have long been one of the biggest complaints about Lambda — yet as Peter DeSantis, AWS’s senior VP of Utility Computing noted in today’s keynote, spiky workloads are pretty much what Lambda (and all other serverless platforms) were built for. With its Firecracker microVMs, AWS already improved cold start times from multip …
