AJ Stuyvenberg

Car buying in 2026 still sucks Buying a car from a dealership is an objectively awful experience.

A blog post went very viral in the AWS space recently which asserts that there’s a silent crash in AWS Lambda’s NodeJS runtime when HTTP calls are made from a Lambda function.

There have been a number of recent changes in the Lambda sandbox environment, mostly transparent ones like changing the Runtime API IP address and port to a link-local IP.

If you mostly know me because of this blog or my cloud talks, it may surprise you to learn that I’m also an avid parachutist.

We all have secrets.

In the first post of this series, we demonstrated that container-based Lambda functions can initialize as fast or faster than zip-based functions.

Note: the second part of this post is available here.

Why you shouldn’t use Lambda layers Lambda layers are a special packaging mechanism provided by AWS Lambda to manage dependencies for zip-based Lambda functions.

This post is both longer and more popular than I anticipated, so I’ve decided to add a quick summary: TL;DR Lambda occasionally pre-initializes execution environments to reduce the number of cold start invocations.

If you’ve heard anything about Serverless Applications or AWS Lambda Functions, you’ve certainly heard of the dreaded Cold Start.