Elevator Pitch
AWS Lambda supports about a dozen of different runtimes. Is there a silver bullet among them?
Description
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Notes
I’ve been writing JVM-based AWS Lambda Functions for our mobile apps’ backends for the past two years.
JVM is far from being ideal tool for this task. It’s greatest flaw is so called “cold starts”: some invocations could take up to a dozen of seconds due to a VM startup and initialization. Scripting languages provide better start times, but the average performance is worse. Golang seems to outbeat anyone else with its instant startups and outstanding performance. However, rewriting everything in Golang was not an option… A year ago AWS announced support for custom runtimes, i.e. any executable, authored in any language, can be potentially used to handle the events as long as the developer hooks it up in the event loop with a special bootstrap script. Being a Kotlin enthusiast, I even tried to use Kotlin/Native for AWS Lambda, but performance and complexity were unacceptable.
I’m going to revise those results in the light of the latest changes and make a short talk out of them, trying to answer the question: is the a best programming language for AWS Lambda?