In this comprehensive talk from AWS re:Invent 2023, AJ Stuyvenberg, an AWS Serverless Hero and Staff Engineer at Datadog, demystifies Lambda cold starts and provides practical strategies for mitigating their impact. Drawing parallels to skydiving safety protocols, Stuyvenberg outlines a priority-based approach to managing cold starts: knowing and reducing loaded code, accurately observing services, working with the Lambda platform, and leveraging containers. He debunks common myths about cold starts and offers insights into proactive initialization and performance optimization techniques. The presentation includes detailed benchmarks and real-world examples, equipping developers with the knowledge to effectively handle cold starts and build more efficient serverless applications on AWS Lambda.