AWS announced this enhancement at 2018 re:Invent. It was slated for "sometime in 2019". I was excited, and I'm impressed that they released the feature well ahead of the end of the year (and before the next conference, which would obviously raise a few questions)
This has been a /major/ sore point for Lambda use, amazing they fixed it, and always great to see they've documented the intense engineering requirements involved to make it happen.
AWS is a beautiful mix of business and technology, it's very rare to see such a large engineering-driven organization managing to balance customer friendliness. I'm an unashamed fanboy
This solves one part of the cold start problem. Starting the container and loading the image on to it is still going to cause some latency.
Wow! That's great. Cold starts are no longer a show stopper! Rust powered APIs running on AWS .. It sounds really exciting
This is great news, but I'm bummed they didn't bundle the NAT gateway with this service. In a typical function that calls out to get data from a service and reads/writes from a DB in a VPC, that requires the somewhat painful configuration of a NAT gateway and dedicated subnets, as well as a $36/month bill for the NAT gateway service.
There are some workarounds that using multiple lambdas, but they have their own gotchas.
Still, hooray, this is good news. The Data API is great for Serverless Aurora, but I can't use that with BI tools.
This is a great improvement for Lambda users, much reduced cold start times!
Iconoclast view ahead (change my mind please):
AWS does tons of stuff around VPCs....I feel like they really want me to use them (or their customers really want to use them), but I just don't see why.
I just run RDS on the internet. I don't have to muck with the complexity or cost of NATs or peering or Lambda slow start or any other weird networking issues.
I know it's "public", but that seems irrelevant in the era of cloud services. This isn't any different than, say, how Firebase or a million other services run. Should I be concerned that my Firebase apps are insecure because someone isn't overlaying a 10.* network on them?
EDIT: I should clarify that I understand the legitimacy of security groups, especially for technologies that weren't meant to operate outside a firewall. But that's mostly a different subject; AWS had security groups years before VPCs and subnets and NATs.
I dont understand why people use AWS Lambda. Here in France, people use PHP with docker and it works just fine. Another scam from amazon?
This is huge for Lambda. It allows devs to create “serverless” apps [1], with relational databases, without 10+ second cold-start times. In the article, they measure it as 988ms.
I have tried building an API using API Gateway <-> Lambda, but had to choose between using DynamoDB to store data (no-SQL, so challenging to query) or suffering unacceptably long response times whenever a request happens to cause a cold-start. Theoretically, this problem is now going away!
[1] https://serverless-stack.com