The Forgotten Runtime: A Case for Serverless Go - Serverless London - March 2023

Matt Carey
The Forgotten Runtime: a case for Serverless Go

[00:00:00] Introduction
[00:00:35] How can we make our Lambda faster?
[00:01:19] What does the perfect Lambda look like?
[00:01:54] How can we test that?
[00:02:50] Let's talk about Node.js - Baseline Testing
[00:04:22] Load Testing
[00:05:29] Can we do better?
[00:05:53] Rust
[00:06:44] Java
[00:07:17] Ruby .NET & Go
[00:09:03] Cold Start Times for Go
[00:10:25] Go Routines
[00:11:38] Memory
[00:13:25] Conclusions
[00:14:04] Future Work
[00:15:29] Q&A


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The talk is about the Forgotten Lambda project, which aims to find the best language for AWS Lambdas. Matt covers the advantages and disadvantages of different runtimes, including Node.js, Python, Rust, Java, Ruby, .NET, and Go. He also emphasises the importance of finding a language that is fast, low-latency, memory-efficient, sustainable, accessible, and has a readable syntax.
He also presents their testing methods, including cold start and load testing, and the results they obtained. Matt also shares future plans, such as automated tree shaking, using Bun, and improving their Go code. Matt also concludes that Node.js is a good runtime for most situations, but Go is a good choice for coldstart-critical functions or those with low memory usage.