Awesome! Thanks for the details.
On the update time, do you see resources changing other than the Function object itself? If so, would be interesting to understand which ones so we can determine whether that really should be necessary.
Assuming no other resources are changing, and this is just the time to update the Function itself, that seems like a very long time - I would expect more like 5-10 seconds. How big is your ultimate Lambda zip (listed in the console)? We've seen size of Lambda cause a significant delay in upload time, especially when geographically far away from the AWS region you are targeting.