A fresh MicroVM took ~26 seconds from run-hook to a mounted home directory. Getting it to a few seconds taught me that on snapshot-booted compute, cold start is mostly first-touch disk I/O, and the platform's /validate hook is the fix.
A walkthrough of building a browser-based Claude Code shell that runs in an AWS Lambda MicroVM with a persistent S3 Files home. Signed in with Cognito, deployed with SAM.
Lambda cold starts in 2026 are 200-400ms for Python, sub-100ms for Go and Rust, and 90-140ms for Java with SnapStart. The data says the argument is over.
Lambda Managed Instances let multiple invocations share the same CPU while waiting on network calls. Here's a working demo, the cost math, and when LMI actually saves you money.
S3 Files mounts your S3 bucket as a local file system in Lambda. I built AI code review agents that share a workspace through it, orchestrated by a durable function.