You keep the same Lambda programming model, event sources, and deployment tools, while gaining access to specialized hardware, multi-concurrency execution environments, and EC2 pricing advantages. AWS handles all operational complexity including instance lifecycle management, OS patching, load balancing, and auto scaling.

You configure a Capacity Provider that defines VPC settings, allowed instance types, and scaling parameters. Lambda then provisions and manages EC2 instances in your account within that provider.

Key differences from standard Lambda: each execution environment can process multiple concurrent requests (reducing compute consumption), there are no cold starts (execution environments are pre-initialized), and scaling is resource-based (monitoring CPU and memory utilization) rather than request-based. You get access to over 400 EC2 instance types across general-purpose, compute-optimized, and memory-optimized families.