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Yeah we thought about that, but is it reliable? We were really not sure we could always get rid of the cold start issue.

AWS Lambda function schedules are driven off the same fault-tolerant, highly available service that powers SWF. (So...yes, they're reliable :)

Is keeping it hot with a cron job reliable though?

Give SNS/SQS a look for polling solutions for API Gateway. We got around it by having a health check call in our set up.

You could potentially use that task as an availability test too.