The Hidden Cost of AWS Lambda SnapStart for Python, and How I Fixed It with Durable Functions

Recently, I opened our AWS bill and found that thousands of dollars had been charged toward AWS Lambda. I was sure we did not have that much traffic. So I started digging through the bill, and that is when I found the real reason. It was Lambda SnapStart. Lambda SnapStart is a great feature. For latency-sensitive applications, especially APIs, it can reduce cold start duration from seconds to sub-seconds by creating a snapshot of the initialized function and caching it. When invoked, Lambda rest