Understanding AWS Lambda performance

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) products like AWS Lambda allow developers to write scalable code without managing the underlying infrastructure, but they introduce challenges in monitoring and optimizing performance due to the lack of traditional metrics. The blog explores how to monitor AWS Lambda functions, focusing on invocation times and latencies when responding to external API requests, using New Relic's tools to observe cold start times and overall function performance. It reveals that factors such as network latency and TLS connection times can outweigh the benefits of keeping Lambda functions warm, suggesting that the performance impact of serverless architectures depends on various components beyond the execution time. The author emphasizes the importance of understanding these components to make informed optimizations and poses questions for developing a robust lambda monitoring strategy, highlighting the ongoing evolution and learning curve in effectively managing serverless systems.