3 ms·
I’m also interested in OPs questions, and additionally would like to hear how many are using Lambda with the API Gateway, and how big of a pain point is cold st
by fuball63 8y ago
I’m also interested in OPs questions, and additionally would like to hear how many are using Lambda with the API Gateway, and how big of a pain point is cold start.
- e1g 8y agoI use API Gateway to provide an API endpoint powered by Lambda (and deployed via Serverless). It took a few hours to understand the relationships between Gateway and Lambda, the wire a custom domain names with HTTPS, but ones you understand its operating model it runs very well. 'Cold starts' is a complicated topic. AWS will keep your Lambda 'hot' for ~5 minutes since the last invocation - you are not paying for the 5 minutes, but it still sits in their RAM waiting for requests. This means that any request within 5 minutes of the last request does not pay the cold-start price. So I used Pingdom to monitor/ping the endpoint every 5 minutes, thus keeping one instance of the function perpetually 'hot'. Note that this hack will not work if you need high concurrency: you can only keep 1 instance alive. In practice, it's enough for us as one instance can serve most of the traffic in our case.
- catchmeifyoucan 8y agoI don't think it's too bad, about ~1s for a cold start. But let's say you serve your login page with Lambda, every request thereafter could be much faster because your function is no longer cold. 1 slow request, but chances are your user is making more than one, or usually it's a fire and forget like a form submission. 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...
- e1g 8y agoGood article! It reflect my experience, but explains the tradeoffs and techniques very well.