The text discusses ways to improve the performance of AWS Lambda functions, specifically focusing on cold starts and timeouts. Cold starts occur when a new Lambda worker is created, taking longer to process requests due to initialization time. To mitigate this, it's recommended to use Provisioned Concurrency or optimize function code to reduce module initialization time. Debugging Lambda timeouts involves identifying the root cause, which can be elevated latency from external services like DynamoDB. To address this, it's essential to track latency metrics for dependencies and use tools like Lumigo or X-Ray to automate tracing and debugging. These tools provide a more polished developer experience and support async event sources, TCP-based transactions, and logging capabilities that make it easier to identify and debug issues in complex serverless applications.