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There has to be something wrong with a tech stack (Node + Lambda) that adds 100ms latency for some requests, just to gain the capability [1] to send out HTTP requests within an environment that almost entirely communicates via HTTP requests.

[1] convenient capability - otherwise you'd use XMLHttpRequest

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1. This is not 100ms latency for requests. It's 100ms latency for the init of a process that loads this code. And this was specifically in the context of a Lambda function that may only have 128MB RAM and like 0.25vCPU. A hello world app written in Java that has zero imports and just prints to stdout would have higher init latency than this.

2. You don't need to use axios. The main value was that it provides a unified API that could be used across runtimes and has many convenient abstractions. There were plenty of other lightweight HTTP libs that were more convenient than the stdlib 'http' module.

On init lambda funcs run a full core, but on invoke the 128MB run at 1/20 core.

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