Infrastructure Briefing — AWS Lambda SnapStart enters general availability

At re:Invent on 28 November 2022, AWS launched Lambda SnapStart for Java, enabling functions to initialize once, snapshot the execution environment, and resume from that snapshot on future cold starts. AWS benchmarks showed startup reductions of up to 90%, allowing latency-sensitive serverless services to skip custom provisioned concurrency or complex warmup pipelines.

Teams running Java-based serverless APIs can enable SnapStart to improve p99 response times and lower cost by reducing provisioned concurrency. Security teams should note that snapshots are encrypted at rest and cleared of temporary credentials, but environment variables and initialization code must still be reviewed to avoid persisting secrets or state across invocations.

• AWS Compute Blog announcement details the 28 November 2022 GA release, performance benchmarks, and configuration steps.
• AWS Lambda SnapStart security guidance explains how snapshots are encrypted and what data is excluded, helping teams assess risk before enabling the feature.