AWS Lambda Container Images: An Architecture Deep-Dive
Having spent years packaging Lambda functions as zip archives, I hit the wall that every team eventually hits: the 250 MB deployment package limit. The first time it happened was an ML inference function with a PyTorch model and its dependency tree. We burned weeks trying to strip binaries, use Lambda Layers creatively, and shave megabytes from scipy. When AWS launched container image support for Lambda in December 2020, it raised the size ceiling to 10 GB and fundamentally changed how I think about Lambda packaging, base image standardization, CI/CD pipelines, and the boundary between serverless and container workloads. Container images let you use the same Dockerfile, the same build toolchain, and the same base image across Lambda, ECS, and Fargate, which eliminates an entire category of "works in my container but not in Lambda" problems.