Lambda Deep Dive Pt 2: Execution Environments

Behind the fleet of nodes that handle a virtually infinitely scaling web service.

Back again to look at AWS Lambda, this time specifically the execution environment and the dreaded cold start problem. Understanding the execution environment will equip you to fully understand how Lambda actually executes the handler code.

In Part 1 we looked at the overview, the pricing, and some general use cases.

AWS Lambda

Execution Environment

Lambda runs on a fleet of bare metal EC2 Nitro instances on an AWS managed account (abstracted) each referred to as Workers. Each worker has a maximum lifetime of 14 hours. The Worker nodes are located in a restricted VPC in the AWS managed account, which blocks customer traffic.