At its re:Invent kickoff keynote tonight, AWS announced a small but important update to Lambda, its serverless platform, that tackles one of the most common issues with the service. Typically, when a function isn’t used for quite a while, Lambda will shut the virtual machine down — and despite improvements like faster Firecracker microVMs, this still takes a while. Now, with SnapStart, AWS is addressing this by creating snapshots of a customer’s Lambda functions and then simply starting those up without having to go through the usual initialization process.
Cold start times have long been one of the biggest complaints about Lambda — yet as Peter DeSantis, AWS’s senior VP of Utility Computing noted in today’s keyno...
