Improved VPC Networking for AWS Lambda

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.<p>I have tried building an API using API Gateway &lt;-&gt; 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!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serverless-stack.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serverless-stack.com</a>

AWS announced this enhancement at 2018 re:Invent. It was slated for &quot;sometime in 2019&quot;. I was excited, and I&#x27;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 &#x2F;major&#x2F; sore point for Lambda use, amazing they fixed it, and always great to see they&#x27;ve documented the intense engineering requirements involved to make it happen.<p>AWS is a beautiful mix of business and technology, it&#x27;s very rare to see such a large engineering-driven organization managing to balance customer friendliness. I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;m bummed they didn&#x27;t bundle the NAT gateway with this service. In a typical function that calls out to get data from a service and reads&#x2F;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&#x2F;month bill for the NAT gateway service.<p>There are some workarounds that using multiple lambdas, but they have their own gotchas.<p>Still, hooray, this is good news. The Data API is great for Serverless Aurora, but I can&#x27;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):<p>AWS does tons of stuff around VPCs....I feel like they <i>really</i> want me to use them (or their customers <i>really</i> want to use them), but I just don&#x27;t see why.<p>I just run RDS on the internet. I don&#x27;t have to muck with the complexity or cost of NATs or peering or Lambda slow start or any other weird networking issues.<p>I know it&#x27;s &quot;public&quot;, but that seems irrelevant in the era of cloud services. This isn&#x27;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&#x27;t overlaying a 10.* network on them?<p>EDIT: I should clarify that I understand the legitimacy of security groups, especially for technologies that weren&#x27;t meant to operate outside a firewall. But that&#x27;s mostly a different subject; AWS had security groups years before VPCs and subnets and NATs.