Yes, you can combine static sites with lambda functions to create semi-automatic or sites that change very slowly. In AWS, you can deploy the static sites using S3 and Cloudfront as a CDN (Content Delivery Network). You can also include javascript in these pages to call Lambda functions.
There are also other options, like a site that can auto-rebuild itself. It works when the lambda updates the content of a page and triggers the rebuild of static files. This process is also very good when the pages don’t change a lot.
To really take profit of lambdas, IMHO, we need to leverage parallel requests, as we make when building a single page application in React or Angular. With parallel requests, the warmup time almost disappear and the site can be very dynamic.
Something I didn’t talk is that we can also use Lambda functions to implement websockets.
Regarding warming periods, they exist and depending on the required application responsiveness can be tricky. Nowadays, you have the option to set the number of functions to stay in a ready state. For large web sites, this option works very well. Most of the time, I don’t use any of these, as the system warms himself up as you start to use it. The warmup time in Python is around 1s for the first call + 200 ~ 500 ms per execution if you access a remote database. It is not very bad, but it also depended on how the user will see the app with these delays. The warmup only happens when a new instance is created. As AWS keep it running for a few minutes, the next call will be promptly answered. Python has one the best warmup times for lambda functions on AWS.
