We use it for a large variety of situation. From direct exposition (via API gateway) to HTTP traffic, to very spiky loads such that we don't pay for hardware i

We use it for a large variety of situation. From direct exposition (via API gateway) to HTTP traffic, to very spiky loads such that we don't pay for hardware in between spikes. We've also have a kind of "hybrid pipeline" that is a mix of both HTTP requests from clients and SQS messages. The HTTP part sends messages to SQS, which triggers lambdas asynchronously so we get retries for free. Your load doesn't strike me as being out of the ordinary, I suspect you had one of the following: - Slow start, which means AWS was unable to re-use an already warm container to run the function a second start. This is particularly true with Java, although they've massively improved it recently. - A dependency on another service which would have caused the slow start (loading a config is a common unexpected culprit) - You mention 2018, so at that time running a lambda within a VPC was notoriously slow to start - You had a limit on your AWS account (default is 1k concurrent I believe)