AWS Lambda Pushes Serverless Toward Long-Running Workloads

Lambda’s 15-minute timeout has quietly shaped serverless architecture since 2018 — plenty of Step Functions fan-outs and chunked ETL jobs exist mostly to work around it. Managed Instances now stretch to 90 minutes, and AWS is refreshingly blunt about the catch: the retry window grows with the function, so duplicate delivery and idempotency stop being theoretical. Synchronous invokes are still capped at 15.