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Let’s Stop Talking About Serverless Cold Starts

Whenever we talk about serverless, there’s always the one person who brings up cold starts

Allen Helton
Better Programming
5 min readSep 7, 2022
Image by user18526052 by FreePik

I was eating dinner the other day with my family. My four year old looked at her plate and said to me, “I don’t want this chicken.”

Naturally, I asked her why to which she responded, “It has sauce on it.”

See, a few months ago, we had a meal with a glaze on it that she… hated. Since then, anything that looked like sauce was a no go for her. If it wasn’t a solid, it was a sauce, and she would reject it.

Super annoying as a parent 😒.

She latched onto an idea, generalized it, and now was too worked up to try anything related.

Sound familiar?

Every presentation I’ve given on serverless, someone has brought up cold starts. They heard about them a few years ago and have latched onto the idea that serverless is a non-starter for them as long as they exist.

So I asked a probing question on Twitter:

Allen Helton
Allen Helton

Written by Allen Helton

I am an AWS serverless hero with a strong focus on API design and standardization, event-driven architectures, and software automation.

Responses (12)

What are your thoughts?

Hi Sarah, thanks for the article! Quick question, what is this line of code does? Isn't `$0.firstName.first!` is sufficient ?
```
let normalizedName = name.folding(options: [.diacriticInsensitive, .caseInsensitive], locale: .current)
```
Also, how do you keep the order of list with `Dictionary` ?

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hi, great tutorial, many thanks !! How do you go further and use CoreData to save your Contacts ?

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