infrastructure//AWS//Lambda

Lambda is Amazon's serverless functions service, the original serverless compute platform (launched 2014). Each invocation spins up a function, executes it, and lets it die.

Lambda is Amazon's serverless functions service, the original serverless compute platform (launched 2014). Each invocation spins up a function, executes it, and lets it die.

Lambda runs functions inside containers, where Workers use V8 isolates: heavier, but it supports more languages and longer execution times.

Cold starts are real. The first invocation after an idle period takes from 100 ms to over a second depending on language and bundle size, because the container has to boot.

A function may run for up to 15 minutes, against the 30 s (paid) or 5 min maximum of Workers.

Vercel Functions are Lambda under the hood: Vercel abstracts the deployment and AWS runs the code.

Pricing is per invocation plus per GB-second of compute, with a free tier of one million requests a month.