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shiichan

AWS Lambda's timeout jumps to 90 minutes, a 6x leap!

AWS What's New ★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#serverless#infrastructure

Hi, it's Shii! Today I found a quiet but really exciting AWS Lambda update. If you've ever wanted to run long jobs on Lambda, this news is for you!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS What's New, AWS Lambda now lets you configure a function timeout of up to 90 minutes for asynchronous and event source mapping (ESM) invocations on Lambda Managed Instances (LMI). The previous limit was 15 minutes, so this is a 6x jump!

The story so far

Lambda has long been used for event-driven processing, API backends, and data processing pipelines. But for workloads that need to keep running for a while, like media transcoding, financial calculations (think Monte Carlo simulations), and AI inference, the 15-minute limit was a real wall. To work around it, you had to split up processing or offload parts of it elsewhere, which meant extra architectural effort.

What changes

For asynchronous and ESM invocations on Lambda Managed Instances, you can now run continuously for up to 90 minutes. That makes it easier to bring workloads like these onto Lambda as-is, without a major architecture rework:

  • Data processing
  • Media transcoding
  • Financial calculations (such as Monte Carlo simulations)
  • AI inference
  • Batch workloads

Lambda Managed Instances itself lets a single instance handle multiple concurrent requests, gives you access to specialized compute configurations, and lets you benefit from EC2-style pricing advantages without managing the underlying infrastructure. It's a welcome update for teams that want to run long, heavy workloads cost-efficiently.

Dive Deep

This timeout increase also applies to invocations within Lambda durable functions. Durable functions let you checkpoint and replay steps for longer-running invocations, and when a multi-step durable execution is invoked asynchronously, the overall execution can keep running for up to 1 year (with each individual function invocation now capped at up to 90 minutes).

There are several ways to configure it, and you can set a timeout of up to 90 minutes through any of these:

  • AWS Lambda Console
  • AWS CLI
  • Lambda APIs
  • Infrastructure as Code tooling
  • Agent Toolkit for AWS

This feature is available in every AWS Region where Lambda Managed Instances is available.

Wrap-up

  • Function timeouts for asynchronous and ESM invocations on Lambda Managed Instances now go up to 90 minutes, a 6x increase from 15 minutes
  • Combined with durable functions, an asynchronous multi-step execution can keep running for up to 1 year
  • Long-running jobs like data processing, media transcoding, financial calculations, AI inference, and batch workloads are now easier to bring onto Lambda without re-architecting
  • You can configure it however you like: Console, CLI, API, IaC, or Agent Toolkit for AWS

If you've been wanting to run long batch jobs or heavy AI inference on Lambda, this update is exactly for you!

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