The Initialization Tax: What Serverless Platforms Aren't Telling You About Performance at Scale
Serverless compute has been marketed as the friction-free frontier of cloud economics—pay only for what executes, eliminate idle capacity, and deploy without managing infrastructure. The reality inside production environments is considerably less tidy, as cold start latency, memory allocation penalties, and opaque warmup behaviors are generating a new category of performance costs that most engineering teams are not formally accounting for.