Gigabytes in milliseconds: Bringing container support to AWS Lambda without adding latency

AWS Lambda offers scalable serverless functions as a service, with the ability to scale up and add capacity in hundreds of milliseconds. When we launched Lambda in 2015, we supported functions up to 250MB in size. In 2020, we set out to allow Lambda customers to bring arbitrary container images, up to 10GBs, without adding additional scale-up latency. This talk covers how we did that, using erasure coding, convergent encryption, deterministic filesystem flattening, and some other unique tools. We’ll cover how our virtualization-based environment, and the Firecracker VMM, allowed us to hide all that magic from customer’s functions.

[@rorymalcolm5054]

Brilliant talk