Example Concept: Cold starts occur when a serverless function is invoked after a period of inactivity, requiring the cloud provider to allocate resources and initialize the function's runtime environment. To mitigate cold starts, you can increase memory allocation (which often speeds up initialization), use provisioned concurrency (available in AWS Lambda), or implement a "keep-alive" strategy by periodically invoking the function to keep it warm. These approaches help maintain lower latency and improve performance for end-users.