Serverless cold starts and how to mitigate them
WHAT IT TESTS: the serverless execution model. OUTLINE: a cold start is the latency to provision and initialize a fresh environment; mitigate with provisioned concurrency, smaller packages, and lighter runtimes. RED FLAG: calling every slow call cold.
WHAT IT TESTS: whether you understand the serverless lifecycle and its latency tradeoffs. ANSWER OUTLINE: a cold start is the extra latency when the platform must create and initialize a fresh execution environment, downloading code, starting the runtime and running init code, before the first request; warm invocations reuse it and skip this. Mitigations: provisioned concurrency, smaller packages, lighter runtimes, and moving heavy setup into init for reuse. RED FLAG: treating every slow invocation as a cold start.
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- #serverless
- #lambda
- #performance
- #cold-start
- #latency
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