When I was building a
Q&A platform backed by DynamoDB and FAISS, AWS Lambda seemed like
the perfect engine. Event-driven. Scales infinitely. Pay-per-use.
Perfect.
And then reality hit.
A simple user query would stall - not because DynamoDB was slow, not because FAISS was overloaded, but because Lambda was cold.
That extra 2–3 seconds feels trivial on paper, however…
❗ For payments, it frustrates customers.
❗ For security, it erodes trust.
❗ For a Q&A system, it shatters the illusion of instant knowledge.
💡AWS has answers :
Provisioned Concurrency - Keeps a specified number of warm environments running at all times to eliminate cold starts.
SnapStart - Caches initialized microVMs, cutting startup from seconds to sub-second with minimal code changes.
Runtime Choice - Python and Node.js cold start faster than Java or .NET, making them better for latency-sensitive apps.
🟢 The real takeaway?
When
designing with Lambda, let's not just evaluate features like
scalability and cost. Let us also consider cold start mitigations and
test how cold starts impact user experience.
References:
https://lnkd.in/eXKkRJwH
https://lnkd.in/em9pQPSN
https://lnkd.in/emuYq-kc
No comments:
Post a Comment