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AWS Lambda is basically CGI, but on a huge scale.

It's an amazing tool for some tasks, but there's a lot of hype around it too.

It does re-use a process for multiple requests, unless it is idle for a period of time in which case it will shut down. You can actually skip your initialization code on multiple runs if it is outside the scope of the handler function.

I think it's kind of the whole point. The instance of the application exists to service one request and then goes away. How many instances there are scales with the number of requests.

And if you have an unpredictable workload, that may be the most cost effective and responsive solution.

Well, if a server could take more than one request and also scale horizontally, that would be so much more efficient.

I am sure it has been done before. /s

Lambda supports several other languages that presumably don't have node's single-thread restriction