Sure, but even if your traffic is bursty, this would be a problem, no? If one container is already running and you suddenly need ten containers, that delay is s

Sure, but even if your traffic is bursty, this would be a problem, no? If one container is already running and you suddenly need ten containers, that delay is still present. Also, I'm not sure your assertion is accurate. Amazon's entire selling point around Lambda is that you don't pay for the time that your code isn't running, which implies that the service was built around not having code running sometimes. If my code was going to be running all the time anyway, why not just run an EC2 instance?