Serverless applications on AWS with Lambda using Java 25, API Gateway and DynamoDB - Part 3 Introducing Lambda SnapStart

Introduction In part 1 , we introduced our sample application. In part 2 , we measured the performance (cold and warm start times) of the Lambda function without any optimizations. We observed quite a large cold start time. In this article, we'll introduce AWS Lambda SnapStart as one of the approaches to reducing the cold start times of the Lambda function. We'll also provide the cold and warm start measurements of the sample application when the SnapStart is enabled for the Lambda function. AWS Lambda SnapStart As we saw in part 2, without any optimizations, Lambda performance measurements showed quite high values, especially for the cold start times. The article Understanding the Lambda execution environment lifecycle provides a good overview of this topic. Lambda SnapStart is one of the optimization approaches to reduce the cold start times. Lambda SnapStart can provide a start time of a Lambda function of less than one second. SnapStart simplifies the development of responsive and