Upcoming Speaking Engagement: JFokus, Stockholm, 2022-05-03

Published on 2022-04-12

I'm going to be speaking at JFokus in Stockholm on May 3. I'll be talking about Java on AWS Lambda and how to reduce the cold start times of a very simple function from 11 seconds to less than a second.

My session is in room C4 from 13:00 to 13:50.

Abstract follows:

Thawing Java on AWS Lambda: Reducing cold start times from 11 seconds to 1

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.