Serverless Cold Starts & Optimizations.

A cold start occurs when a Serverless platform (AWS Lambda) spins up a new instance to handle a request, resulting in latency.

The platform must allocate a container, boot the runtime (Node, Java, etc.), and initialize the application code. To mitigate this: use lighter runtimes (Go/Python vs Java), minimize deployment package size, keep connections outside the handler, or use AWS Provisioned Concurrency to keep instances warm.