Slightly OT but would be cool if there was a way to run computations in some on-demand VM that cold started in 200ms, did it thing, died and you only paid for the time you used it. In essence s lambda that exposed you a full blown VM rather than a limited environment.

There are a few ways to approach this. If you don't mind owning the orchestration layer this is precisely what firecracker does.

If you don't even want to pay for that though scheduling unikernels on something like ec2 gets you your full vm, is cheaper, has more resources than lambda and doesn't have the various limitations such as no gpu or timeouts or anything like that.

I would kill for this as a AWS service, but I admit all my use cases are around being too frugal to pay for the time it takes to initialize a EC2 instance from zero (like CI workers where I don’t want to pay when idle but also the task could possibly run longer than the lambda timeout).

Working on that now ;)