Have your Serverless Kotlin Functions and Eat Them Too | Andrew O'Hara

It’s a sad reality that JVM functions have poor cold-start performance on serverless platforms, like AWS Lambda. You may have been tempted to compile your jar to a native image, or to pay extra to keep your functions warm. You may have decided that serverless is only suited to asynchronous tasks without latency requirements. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

You can have your Kotlin Functions and you can eat them too. You can run an entire API service; but only if you design it right. In this talk, I’m going to teach you how to minimize your function’s init phase, abandon your heavyweight dependencies, and even eliminate the need for reflection. When we’re done, you won’t have to settle for other languages.

#kotlinconf #kotlin

[oharaandrew]

Thanks for having me, JetBrains! Let's do this again next year.

[clurigaconrad]

One of the more interesting talks of the conference!

[kino_cinante]

If you are using thinking of using severless for internal work that is not latency sensitive why not just go straight for a monolith with queues...

[suhuy]

Looks impressive until you realize that Go and Rust are 20ms, still 10x faster.
Maybe Kotlin native can be comparable to Go when it supports AWS SDK and lambdas.