Poor phrasing, then. Meant to say a container is started once, then queried on every subsequent request. And what I’m talking about is not the user-facing lambda, but what AWS does on the infrastructure layer below, which involves running a containerised process on firecracker VMs, communicating via HTTP. There was a great summary of how AWS works a while ago, going into way more detail, that I sadly can’t find anymore. But there’s definitely more work involved in calling a lambda function than forking a process in nginx.