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> Cold starts. This isn’t the time to dive in deep, but it’s a main reason why some companies decided against going Serverless. Cold starts as an issue? I mean

> Cold starts. This isn’t the time to dive in deep, but it’s a main reason why some companies decided against going Serverless. Cold starts as an issue? I mean, all you have to do is create a CloudWatch event (or cron if you want an explicit server involved) to fire the Lambda function every few minutes and you're all good. Sure, if you get heavy traffic, I suppose you could have multiple containers running simultaneously? But that's also easy enough to handle w/ CW events.

jrs95 9y ago
At that point, if you’re running it all the time anyways, why not just have something like an auto scaling Kubernetes cluster?
- CharlesW 9y ago
  Because the cost and level-of-effort difference between those two options isn't comparable. Firing a function in a way that keeps it awake but uses no perceptible resources is simple and basically free.
  - jrs95 9y ago
    I wasn’t super familiar with the pricing, this makes sense.
mslate 9y ago
Wow, sounds easy--almost as if it should be that way out of the box...
- dasil003 9y ago
  The economics don't work out if they keep them all hot all the time.
  - hliyan 9y ago
    Woot can't they give a simple Boolean seeing for a slightly higher price: "always up"?
    - hliyan 9y ago
      *why can't they My mobile client's edit doesn't work
    - bluepeter 9y ago
      It's probably not as easy as that. Lambda functions run in a container. If you have a spike in traffic, you may have 10 different containers handling requests. So should they keep 1 container always up, or 3, or 10. I suppose you could have some ELB-type rules to "auto-scale" new containers...
  - bluepeter 9y ago
    They do for me. It's basically free to fire a function every 5 minutes, have the function immediately close, and have that Lambda container sit around for another ~10 minutes "hot" and waiting for a real request to handle.
  - chrisan 9y ago
    Aren't these cloudwatch/cron events basically doing exactly that? People are keeping their functions hot and not using resources but AWS is having to keep those containers up 100% of the time
    - dasil003 9y ago
      Yes, but by making it something you have to laboriously set up rather than a default 95% of people won't do it, and you can afford to let 5% do this hack without jacking up low-end prices.
noway421 9y ago
That sounds like a hack, not a working solution
herbturbo 9y ago
One of the big problems with Lambda cold starts is the concurrency issue, especially if your Lambdas are running inside a VPC: https://hackernoon.com/im-afraid-you-re-thinking-about-aws-lambda-cold-starts-all-wrong-7d907f278a4f https://hackernoon.com/im-afraid-you-re-thinking-about-aws-l...

jrs95 9y ago

At that point, if you’re running it all the time anyways, why not just have something like an auto scaling Kubernetes cluster?

CharlesW 9y ago
Because the cost and level-of-effort difference between those two options isn't comparable. Firing a function in a way that keeps it awake but uses no perceptible resources is simple and basically free.
- jrs95 9y ago
  I wasn’t super familiar with the pricing, this makes sense.

mslate 9y ago

Wow, sounds easy--almost as if it should be that way out of the box...

dasil003 9y ago
The economics don't work out if they keep them all hot all the time.
- hliyan 9y ago
  Woot can't they give a simple Boolean seeing for a slightly higher price: "always up"?
  - hliyan 9y ago
    *why can't they My mobile client's edit doesn't work
  - bluepeter 9y ago
    It's probably not as easy as that. Lambda functions run in a container. If you have a spike in traffic, you may have 10 different containers handling requests. So should they keep 1 container always up, or 3, or 10. I suppose you could have some ELB-type rules to "auto-scale" new containers...
- bluepeter 9y ago
  They do for me. It's basically free to fire a function every 5 minutes, have the function immediately close, and have that Lambda container sit around for another ~10 minutes "hot" and waiting for a real request to handle.
- chrisan 9y ago
  Aren't these cloudwatch/cron events basically doing exactly that? People are keeping their functions hot and not using resources but AWS is having to keep those containers up 100% of the time
  - dasil003 9y ago
    Yes, but by making it something you have to laboriously set up rather than a default 95% of people won't do it, and you can afford to let 5% do this hack without jacking up low-end prices.

noway421 9y ago

That sounds like a hack, not a working solution

herbturbo 9y ago

One of the big problems with Lambda cold starts is the concurrency issue, especially if your Lambdas are running inside a VPC: https://hackernoon.com/im-afraid-you-re-thinking-about-aws-lambda-cold-starts-all-wrong-7d907f278a4f https://hackernoon.com/im-afraid-you-re-thinking-about-aws-l...