Craft Conf was back as in a hybrid format for 2022 after Covid. I was there as a replacement for my colleague Jimmy who had been accepted but couldn’t attend.
Thawing Java on AWS Lambda: Reducing Cold Start Times From Eleven Seconds to One
Java has never been a perfect fit for Function as a Service platforms such as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions. While both platforms have official support for Java, Java functions unfortunately suffer from significantly longer cold start times than many other runtimes.
In this talk I will show a simple Spring Cloud Java function running on AWS Lambda with fairly horrible cold start times of around 11 seconds and then show how we can fix this by replacing Spring Cloud with Micronaut and use GraalVM Native Image to perform most of the work during compile time. The end result is cold start times of less than a second, making Java a viable, though not without drawbacks, choice for FaaS platforms that support custom runtimes.