I'm curious about latency, cold and warm, using docker. I have a dockerized number cruncher and it's a breeze to maintain, and I'm thinking of moving everything over. What's your experience?
My understanding is that cold starts on containerized Lambdas is actually better than non-containerized for some workloads, because using containers allows Lambda to do better caching of the code, as well as lazy-loading. YMMV of course based on exactly what image you use (eg if you're not using a common base, like Ubuntu or Amazon Linux, you won't get as much benefit from the caching) and how much custom code you have (like hundreds of MBs worth).
I never had a case where cold starts mattered because either 1) it was the kind of service where cold starts intrinsically didnt matter, or 2) we generally had > 1 req/15mins meaning we always had something warm.
3) Also you can pay for provisioned capacity[1] if the cold start thing makes it worth the money, though also just look into fargate[2] if that's the case.
There are lots of kinds of containerization too btw, if i'm not mistaken AWS has a lot of investment in Firecracker too https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/
Docker is a bit more cold start time over native (zipped). That said, rust is so much faster than the scripted languages it's still much faster than what most are doing.
