Cold EBS volumes can seriously slow down application startup. At Appian, we tackled this with Hydrator, focusing on prewarming the filesystem and the files applications actually need instead of warming everything.
I recently wrote about the engineering behind this ~7.5× improvement, the optimisations we made, and the lessons we learned along the way.
Technical deep dive: https://medium.com/appian-tech-blog/hydrator-8c3b430c17f1
Repo: https://github.com/appian/tech-blog-examples/tree/main/hydrator-cli
