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Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

Just wanted to say thanks for this new feature. The ability to use images up to 10 GB is huge. Being able to customize the container image down to the base OS is also nice. Don't let the negativity around the Lambda-specific bits get you down. I know that Lambda is about more than just serving HTTP, and I for one plan to use this new feature for a non-HTTP use case soon.

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Thanks! Appreciate the feedback and hope this helps you out. Let us know if it doesn't :)

- Chris

I do have a question. I know that Lambda normally reuses a running container for multiple consecutive function invocations. What if I don't want to do that for a particular function? Suppose, for security, I don't want any leftovers from a previous invocation (in case it had data from a different user). Is there a way I could gracefully tell Lambda to create a fresh container instance for each invocation, and just live with the cold start penalty every time? Edit: I could just look to Fargate at this point, but it sounds like Lambda is doing some extra cold start optimization.

No good way to do this today. You are right in that you'd be forcing cold-starts. You could use a Lambda Extension to provide some sort of after-processing clean up of vars or /tmp space.. but thats hypothetical I haven't seen anyone do that yet.

I think what I'll do is write a container entry point that cleans up temporary files like you said, but also repeatedly spawns a new process for the main program, to minimize the findable leftover data in RAM. Just in case an attacker finds a Heartbleed equivalent in my application.

Thanks again!

Just a heads up we're trying to do that with Fargate right now and theres a limit to how quickly fargate can spin up new instances (like max 10 at a time); it's not well designed to do a single-execution-per-message right now, at least at a decent load.

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