AWS Lambda Managed Instances: Setting Min/Max to Zero Deactivates Functions, Not Idles Them

AWS Lambda Managed Instances (LMI), introduced at re:Invent 2025, places Lambda functions on EC2 capacity while retaining Lambda's programming model, but its scaling behavior differs sharply from standard Lambda. When both MinExecutionEnvironments and MaxExecutionEnvironments are set to 0, LMI does not idle the function awaiting the next request — it fully deactivates the function version and terminates all backing EC2 instances. Any invocation against a deactivated version returns a hard failure with no cold start, no queuing, and no automatic retry or reactivation. Reactivation requires a manual intervention, such as pushing a new non-zero scaling configuration via the console, the PutFunctionScalingConfig API, or a scheduled action. This behavior is fundamentally different from standard Lambda concurrency throttling and represents a critical operational distinction for engineers running non-continuous workloads on LMI.
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