Thanks for this post! I completely agree that migrating to Java 17 is a good step. There is one thing I would like to add to your post. The performance difference between ‘plain’ Java 11 and 17 while performing a cold start is substantial in the performance results table. However this is not because Java 17 is a lot faster, but because AWS also applied some cold start improvements now by default.

> In the Java 17 runtime, the JVM flag for tiered compilation is now set to stop at level 1 by default.

See also the intro post on the AWS blog https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/java-17-runtime-now-available-on-aws-lambda/. This explains the big difference in cold start performance.