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Using Docker images as deployment packages for AWS Lambda has two notable disadvantages from my point of view:

- You're suddenly responsible for managing the whole operating system again, neglecting one of the major benefits of AWS Lambda.

- You need to store the Docker images in AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR) which adds additional complexity to the setup.

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Doesn't a lambda based on a docker container incur container startup time, whereas if you use one of their language-specific SDKs you don't?

AWS Lambda doesn't run a container like one might expect, but it treats the files in the Docker image basically the same as if it's be a regular AWS Lambda runtime rootfs + your application code. So if there are differences in cold start time, reasons for that could be that a docker image is fetched from ECR instead of S3 for regular Lambda packages and that a docker image is likely larger than the usual Lambda package.

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