Dude where's my coldstart?

Maybe I’m just turning into one of those old programmers who doesn’t keep with technology, but the incredible inefficiency described and the workarounds for it are just mind-boggling to me.<p>Then again, maybe it is cost-effective to burn seconds of CPU time and tens to hundreds of megabytes per request handled.<p>I’m sure some C programmer from the CGI days would be floored by how much resources multithreaded ruby and python app servers use.

In what potential world would it ever make sense to start an entire container <i>for each request</i>?<p>The entire architecture that leads to such a concept is so dumb I have trouble believing anyone ever thought it could be a decent idea.

Disclosure: I&#x27;m the maintainer of the open source project - openfaas which this blog post talks about. It also covers other FaaS frameworks and why we see a &quot;cold start&quot; even when using Kubernetes as our platform.

So this serverless solution has a watchdog process always running and mapping requests to the correct process? It that more like a server than serverless? Will the next optimisation be launching one thread per request? In which case we are back to square one (:

The benefit from an app running in a container and already listening to an HTTP port with on top an horizontal autoscaler looks small. I might miss something in the approach but as watchdog requires an &quot;HTTP-level multiplexing for requests&quot; (so the app should listen for http), the app is already running in a container with watchdog: everything is in place to not need watchdog.<p>From the FAQ:<p>&gt; Why do I need watchdog anyway?<p>&gt; Whilst we don’t recommend it, if you’re using a HTTP microservice that conforms to the Workloads spec, then technically you may be able to get away without using it.

This is a joke right?