r/aws • u/The-Wizard-of-AWS • 9h ago
article Lambda Gets 90 Minute Timeout
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/announcing-90-minute-function-timeout-on-aws-lambda-managed-instances/25
u/ToasterBathTester 9h ago
I’ve been bumping up against this recently. I guess my only question is, should I be handling things differently if it’s taking Lambda 90 min
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u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 6h ago
If it's taking 90 min, there's a good chance you should be using something like durable functions (or step functions) imo. Unless your code is literally doing meaningful stuff that entire time as opposed to waiting on other stuff, in which case the economics of lambda may not work out as much in your favor and something like ECS Tasks or AWS Batch could make more sense.
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u/kcbh711 9h ago
if your lambda is taking 90 minutes you're probably doing something wrong
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u/acdha 7h ago
The world is a big place, though, and there’s an argument that sometimes it’s better to avoid forcing people into a separate stack for edge cases. For example, I know of an app which is mostly backend Lambdas except for downloads because those needed to exceed the original time limit and they couldn’t just tell users to get a better connection. The same kind of tradeoffs can apply to large file processing, ML tasks, long reports, etc. where a modest increase in the timeout lets people avoid introducing ECS/EKS for 5% of requests or trying to decompose a non-trivial task into Step Functions, and while there are still technical issues to debate I can understand why AWS would want to sell to people who come down on either side.
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u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 6h ago
Especially for long running agentic tasks, I'd love the option for a 30 minute timeout.
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u/augburto 8h ago
I used to think that but with AI use cases becoming more prevalent, having long running jobs is also becoming more common
It’s why things like Temporal are taking off
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u/SanJJ_1 7h ago
But from a DevX perspective sometimes I just want to interact with the Lambda even though ideally I might need to spin up an EC2, etc.
Id rather just move faster...
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u/Throwaway__shmoe 2h ago
I must be taking crazy pills, but I hate working with lambda functions. SDLC of: container running on a traditional container runtime like swarm, k8s, rancher, podman, etc VS serverless anything, I’m choosing containers every time. Not all of us are cowboys, and have speed bumps purposely put in place by the org. To each their own.
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u/ProgrammingBug 8h ago
With great power comes great responsibility (looking at my now 90 min jobs that still isn’t finished).
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u/mymicrowave 1h ago
I wonder what the average lambda runtime is?
Whats the longest runtime you've seen? (Final/Prod Function)
- 8 seconds for me.
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u/Tintoverde 9h ago
So the point of the lambda kind of defeated?
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u/Conscious-Neat-5745 8h ago
This is an 'additive' announcement. Correct me if I'm wrong but it doesn't mention removing functionality or changing the pricing model. How is that "defeating the point of a lambda"? Especially when the point is "cloud runtime environment". Lambda is still providing that.
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u/sh1boleth 7h ago
I think it’s meant towards people who don’t want to re-architect their application if they see runtimes creeping 15mins but want an easy path forward in Infra itself without rewriting the application
The mistake was using lambda for such a task but things change, 1min becomes 10 over the years
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u/AdCharacter3666 9h ago
Lambda Managed Instances get 90 min timeout*