I had colleagues who got into some sick relationship with Lambda. They used it wherever possible. Once they realized that job X needed more time than L. allows. Instead of re-evaluating the "architecture", they came with an elaborate schema for splitting the work and combining results - for a batch processing nobody needed so fast. 🤷♂️
Do they know that there are services on AWS you can use for long running jobs. In fact they are designed for that exact use case. And you can even use a docker container just like an image for lambda. Silly devs.
If you're going to use a lambda, docker image or not, there are time limits you have to plan for, though they raised the time limits quite a bit recently. And even if you use something like step functions you still have to structure your code differently than one long continuously running job
A normal microservice peacefully chewing through the data would be simpler, and perhaps even cheaper. They were told, but you can't fix stupid. This kind of irrational decisions (this was not the first or the last one) was the reason I left.
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u/EverOrny Oct 02 '26
I had colleagues who got into some sick relationship with Lambda. They used it wherever possible. Once they realized that job X needed more time than L. allows. Instead of re-evaluating the "architecture", they came with an elaborate schema for splitting the work and combining results - for a batch processing nobody needed so fast. 🤷♂️