cycles can be pretty quick with lambda, definitely faster than launching a container into k8s or ecs. there's good tooling for local execution too
Especially when you don't have a good local AWS runner, vs using a HTTP service you can run and live reload on your laptop.
deploying to prod in less than 10 seconds, or even /live reloading/ the AWS service would be awesome.
CDK has a new(ish) feature called hotswap that also bypasses CloudFormation and makes deploys faster.
Pushing your image up to your registry, running `kubectl apply`, waiting for it to schedule your Pod and start your containers and exec'ing into them when shit breaks is WAY faster than zipping up your artifact and any layers that come with it, uploading it into S3, and re-deploying your Lambda functions (and any API Gateway apps associated with them), IMO.
When I use Serverless to do this, deploys take up to two minutes, which I sometimes do often because I have no real way of troubleshooting the application within Lambda (definitely necessary if you're using Lambda base images; less necessary if you're rolling your own; likely if you're integrating with API Gateway since documentation on the payloads sent from it is lacking IMO).