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If you are serving high traffic then what's the problem?

If your product has only occasional use then you trade cost for latency; spin up an ec2 instance if your request times exceed a few minutes call

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You could have certain requests that don't come that often, even on a high traffic site. And if you don't know for how long lambdas stay hot, how are you supposed to time it? Even a call every few minutes may not be enough to keep them hot.

Ah, I see. Perhaps that would be a reason to keep an ec2 instance spun up to host the functionality that must always have latency < warmup+runtime? Surely suboptimal. This makes me consider running a cron job to poke timing critical lambda workflows every few minutes...which to me imply writing my functions in such away as to expect this "heartbeat" and act accordingly...and that just feels plain icky...

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