November 11, 2024 - AWS says that SnapStart can improve the startup performance for a latency-sensitive application by up to 10x with no extra cost. SnapStart is free, you will only be charged for the business logic inside the handler.

If you're using the Lambda Annotations ... (such as nodejs24.x and ruby3.4), OS-only runtimes, and container images are not supported. SnapStart does not support provisioned concurrency, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), or ephemeral storage greater than 512 MB....

February 4, 2025 - Applications with predictable traffic patterns. Real-time processing systems where delays are unacceptable. SnapStart is a newer feature designed specifically for Java-based Lambda functions.

Using provisioned concurrency incurs additional charges to your account. If you're working with the Java 11 or Java 17 runtimes, you can also use Lambda SnapStart to mitigate cold start issues at no additional cost. SnapStart uses cached snapshots of your execution environment to significantly ...

June 25, 2024 - In practice, it drives you towards having monolithic functions so you can consolidate and minimize the number of provisioned concurrencies you need to use. This runs counter to Lambda best practices which recommend having small, single-purposed functions. The newly announced SnapStart feature takes another big leap towards cutting down cold start duration for Java functions.

August 14, 2025 - SnapStart vs Provisioned Concurrency (PC) • SnapStart: Pay per snapshot cache/restore; great for many bursty workloads; no EFS/PC. • PC: Always-warm environments; extra charges constantly; works with EFS; deterministic lowest-latency.

May 27, 2023 - If you need predictable function start times for your workload, Provisioned Concurrency is the recommended solution to ensure the lowest possible latency. This feature keeps your functions initialized and warm, ready to respond in double-digit ...

Provisioned Concurrency is more expensive but guarantees instant responses, whereas SnapStart provides significant improvements at a lower cost. For most Java-based applications, SnapStart is the better choice.

March 17, 2024 - Unlike on-demand Lambda functions, all setup activities happen ahead of invocation (including container start, bootstrap runtime and running the initialization code). Provisioned Concurrency adds cost to Lambda service.

July 23, 2025 - “Why is my Lambda cold again?” That was the question I kept asking myself while monitoring an API-heavy application I was scaling on AWS Lambda. Despite having optimized the code, slimmed the package, and tuned timeouts, the cold start monster kept creeping in — especially during spiky traffic hours. For a product where users expect a sub-100ms response time, even a single 2-second delay meant friction. That’s when I decided to go deeper. The answer? Provisioned Concurrency and SnapStart.

Logs of the activity suggest these ... such as SnapStart and Lambda@Edge. Using cold start optimization, SnapStart employs pre-initialized snapshots ......

January 14, 2024 - SnapStart is a performance optimization option that helps to reduce the initialization time of Lambda functions at no additional costs. Fully powered by AWS, Provisioned Concurrency keeps your function warm, and ready to respond in double-digit ...

Another interesting approach is Lambda's napstart. This is more relevant if you're using Java. And again, it doesn't really solve cold starts per se, but it can greatly reduce the duration of a cold start, especially for languages like Java, where the cold starts can be more significant than with other runtimes. So if you're using Java and you want to reduce the cold start duration, definitely check out snapstart.

June 22, 2023 - Provisioned concurrency adds cost to Lambda service. Reduce the init code execution time by utilizing some design patterns (for example, connection pool-like libraries). AWS Lambda SnapStart: New feature introduced recently for Java 11 Corretto ...

August 17, 2025 - Discover how AWS SnapStart slashes cold start latency in Java AWS Lambda functions using JVM state snapshots and smart concurrency optimizations — perfect for serverless performance at scale.

When Lambda SnapStart is activated, the Init phase happens when you publish a function version. Lambda saves a snapshot of the memory and disk state of the initialized execution environment, persists the encrypted snapshot, and caches it for low-latency access. If you have a before-checkpoint runtime hook, then the code runs at the end of Init phase. The 10-second timeout doesn't apply to functions that are using provisioned concurrency...

January 24, 2022 - First of all, SnapStart is only ... Java 8, or custom runtimes.) Further, SnapStart can only be used with x86 architecture, and it does not support use of provisioned concurrency, EFS, X-Ray, or ephemeral storage greater than 512 MB....

July 15, 2025 - On a trigger, the Lambda function goes to different phases. The first is the INIT phase. When you enable Lambda SnapStart, Lambda saves a snapshot of the memory and disk state of the initialized execution environment resulting from the INIT phase and uses that for SnapStart functions.

All snapshots are deleted after 14 days of inactivity. With that said, Lambda refreshes this cache if it depends on a patched or updated runtime. SnapStart cannot be used with provisioned concurrency.