Lambda supports "Provisioned Concurrency" which lets you minimize the "jitter" of cold starts.

That said, it still isn't perfect. But it's much more predictable latency-wise, and AWS has managed to get cold starts down to a level where they're quite decent recently (~500ms would be a "bad" one these days).

Old benchmarks are dated these days. I wish there were some better ones.

Source: I build a Serverless hosting platform built on top of AWS Lambda. https://refinery.io

Even though it's often sold that way, I don't think Lambda is a good fit for interactive use cases. Unless it's used sparingly you don't really want it serving your website or api. It's much better suited for glue code, cron jobs, processing some work queue, etc.

If you load all the dependencies outside of the actual event loop, then these will only be loaded in a function's cold start before it is suspended between requests.

With this, you're only effectively paying this cold-start costs on first load of a new function (or whilst adding extra concurrency) and they're often kept around for 4-8 hours, even if they don't receive any requests.

Didn’t they announce that you can use containers with lambdas now? So just put your environment in a container