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Serverless Networking: Cold Starts, VPC, and Timeouts

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Serverless networking: ephemeral compute, persistent connections

Serverless functions trade instance management for per-invocation pricing. The networking challenge: functions are ephemeral (can be destroyed and recreated) but databases expect persistent connections. Cold starts add TCP handshake latency. VPC attachment enables private networking but adds configuration complexity.

Understanding these tradeoffs explains why serverless architectures require different patterns than traditional long-running servers.

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