One thing that wasn't clear to me, is that if running NPM to install dependencies on pod startup is slow, why not pre build an image with dependencies already installed, and deploy that instead?
Surely they weren't running npm at start. It's just that nodejs allows multiple versions of the same module to coexist and all the different version clients have different version dependencies which could be collapsed to one common version.
> if running NPM to install dependencies on pod startup is slow
Loading the AWS SDK via `require` was slow, not installing. As sibling comment says - collapsing different SDKs into one helped reduce loading times of the many SDKs.
