At Hakuna we use our own service to start and stop our Jira and NPM servers; the instances are automatically stopped at night or whenever nobody needs to do `npm install`.

In our use case, the EC2 instance starts in about 50 seconds, with another minute needed to start the Jira service.

We have a demo, deployable directly from our CLI, that starts a Nginx server on an Oracle Cloud instance in less than 40 seconds.

If the instance is being stopped and a new request arrives, it will have to wait shutdown + startup, yes.