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World Congress 2025 • Aug 20, 2025 • Session details

High performance Serverless Java on AWS

Vadym Kazulkin

Are multi-second cold starts ruining your serverless Java APIs? Discover how AWS SnapStart and GraalVM can slash your Lambda initialization latency to under 600 milliseconds.

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#1 about 2 min

Why Java lags in serverless adoption on AWS

Slow cold start times and high memory footprints hinder Java usage in AWS Lambda compared to Python and JavaScript.

#2 about 3 min

Building a serverless Java API with DynamoDB

Implementing a request handler connected to an API Gateway and native NoSQL databases avoids relational connection pool challenges.

#3 about 3 min

Demystifying AWS Lambda cold start mechanics

Unused Lambda environments require spinning up Firecracker microVMs, initializing the JVM, and executing static blocks before the business logic runs.

#4 about 3 min

Benchmarking untreated Java cold starts on Lambda

Stress testing a basic one-gigabyte Java Lambda shows excellent warm performance but critical three-second delays during cold initializations.

#5 about 4 min

Mitigating cold starts using AWS SnapStart snapshots

AWS takes a managed Firecracker microVM snapshot after initialization during deployment to resume execution with lower latency upon invocation.

#6 about 4 min

Optimizing snapshots through explicit application priming

Developers manually pre-instantiate HTTP clients and deserialize mock data before the checkpoint hook runs to embed singletons into the snapshot.

#7 about 4 min

Evaluating SnapStart latency and snapshot cache mechanics

Primed snapshots lower initial latencies to one second, while continued invocations warm the tiered cache to further shrink execution delays.

#8 about 3 min

Tracing Lambda invocations to prime event serializers

Analyzing heatmaps with async profilers uncovers hidden invocation delays, allowing developers to manually initialize Jackson date serializers before snapshotting.

#9 about 1 min

Understanding SnapStart costs and architectural limits

While currently free for Java, managed snapshotting incurs cache storage costs for Python and .NET and lacks elastic file system support.

#10 about 3 min

Compiling GraalVM native images for AWS Lambda

Ahead-of-time compilation yields sub-600ms latency but shifts CI/CD build burdens and dynamic reflection management entirely onto the developer.

#11 about 2 min

Comparing Java optimization paths and future upgrades

SnapStart provides a managed path for application productivity while GraalVM achieves maximum latency savings, pending future native JVM framework features.

Matching moments

3:35 min

Optimizing Java startup processes for fast serverless workloads

Daniel Oh Daniel Oh +1 · WWC 2024

11:17 min

Optimizing application performance via GraalVM native images

Josh Long · LIVE

5:22 min

Evolving serverless compute with Firecracker and SnapStart

Werner Vogels Werner Vogels · WWC Europe 2026

2:20 min

Overcoming Java cold starts using the Quarkus framework

Alex Soto Alex Soto · LIVE

11:32 min

Q&A on low-code tradeoffs and serverless performance

Dávid Lévai · LIVE

4:37 min

Understanding AWS Lambda cold and warm starts

Vadym Kazulkin Vadym Kazulkin · LIVE

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