I just started using cron to keep my cloud functions warm at a cost of pennies per month. It feels like a strange ceremony to let more knowledgeable people game the system. Even figuring out the time that your functions go 'cold' is a secret handshake you can't find in proper documentation.

I'm curious what's going to happen when everyone else does this too. It goes without saying this isn't the intended use for the price they've set and it's also apparent that >75% of customers will, likely, choose to make this performance optimization before going to production or after complaints of bad latency.

Also it is a bit scary that even with keeping a single server warm, you still pay the cold startup penalty on subsequent scale-ups. Afaik, no cloud provider has claimed to have 'solved' this (yet more secrecy in how the platform is managed)