During the first day of QCon Dan-Francisco 2023, Mike Danilov, a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS, presented on AWS Lambda and what is under the hood. The talk is a part of the “Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About.”
Danilov’s talk centered around invoke routing, compute infrastructure, and cold starts topics.
During the first day of QCon Dan-Francisco 2023, Mike Danilov, a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS, presented on AWS Lambda and what is under the hood. The talk is a part of the “Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About.”
Danilov’s talk centered around invoke routing, compute infrastructure, and cold starts topics. Before diving into these topics, he explained AWS Lambda, providing examples, its configuration, invocation models sync and async, and its fundamentals (availability, efficiency, scale, security, and performance).
From a 10,000 perspective, AWS Lambda has various aspects; however, in the talk, Danilov dives particularly into invocation and infrastructure to mitigate the cold start problem. The goal was to shorten the latency invoke distribution of an AWS Lambda function (less time for invocation, runtime, code, and sandbox).
Before 2022, AWS Lambda’s invoke routing system faced challenges regarding scaling and availability. The worker manager, responsible for handling incoming requests, struggled to manage the growing demand, scaling until it simply couldn’t handle the load anymore. Sandboxes, which stored the execution state in memory, posed a significant risk. In the event of a zonal failure, the sandbox state could be lost, undermining system resiliency. AWS introduced the placement service to address these issues, although recovery from such failures remained a challenge.
However, AWS introduced durable storage, featuring a leader-follower model, ensuring no sandboxes were lost during failures.
