
Ask HN: Why does AWS Lambda have a time limit? - johnnyodonnell
Is the time limit something that we could potentially see removed in the future?
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smt88
Managing infrastructure that runs millions of programs in Turing-complete
languages is a lot easier when execution time is known to be X, rather than
potentially being infinite.

It also transfers a lot of complexity and responsibility for Lambda from AWS
engineers onto the users of Lambda.

This setup makes sense to me, and I don’t see a need for it to change.

If you have really long-running processes, a different AWS service like
Elastic Beanstalk (or your own self-hosted Lambda-like service) is a better
fit.

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QuinnyPig
It’s certainly a creative answer to the Halting Problem!

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smt88
Parse.com did the same thing, as did all of those old-school PHP hosts, so
it's been a common solution for at least the 22 years I've been using hosting
services -- maybe longer.

