That blog post author is mistaken. You can fire off async stuff outside of your handler just fine without AWS SDK v3 or top level await. Just run an async IIFE

That blog post author is mistaken. You can fire off async stuff outside of your handler just fine without AWS SDK v3 or top level await. Just run an async IIFE and assign it to a variable outside your handler. You can await that promise when you need it in your handler, but it kicked off running before your handler was invoked.