It is in our case. This is a service which is very seasonal, so it may be used during a couple of days each month only. Having a bunch of instances mostly idle would definitely be more expensive
When I worked on this I used this article as a reference: https://serverless.com/blog/serverless-python-packaging/ and also ended up with a huge image. What that article didn't mention is that the virtual environment folder should be excluded in the serverless config file, as the runtime is provided by boto3. So adding:
package:
exclude:
- venv/
would reduce the size considerably (to 50 MB in my case)
Our problem is that we have a team of data scientists who are familiar with Python, plus a decent set of custom tools written in it, so changing languages isn't an option
We've been packaging pandas in a lambda which is used to perform some calculations, but being a 50 MB zip file makes cold starts of about 6-8 secs. We're lucky that the service has little use, thus our way to workaround it is by having a lambda warmer which is run every 5 minutes and invokes N pandas lambdas. I'd be very interested in knowing if Layers has some feature to avoid this kind of issue.
From one of the video comments: "They (Maria João, conductor, and orchestra) had recorded 6 months earlier three Mozart concerti. This lunch concert was the rehearsal for the evening performance. Since they had rehearsed to prepare the recording six months earlier, this lunch concert was the only rehearsal. She came prepared to play K. 467 and was caught off guard by K. 466 (although it has been in her repertory for years)."
Website is a complete mess and the page you refer to was probably about the previous model which was withdrawn. Anyway, after some search I managed to find it here in Spain and even order one (they have a nice discount these days due to Black Friday). This one should make it for you: http://www.dell.com/de/unternehmen/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd?o...
I'm in a similar situation to yours and been reading some positive reviews about this https://slimbook.es/
They seem to be very responsive in terms of doubts, questions, etc. but as most small companies their main disadvantage is brand awareness when compared to Dell or Apple. But of course this is greatly compensated by a cheaper price.