Ask HN: Why does AWS Lambda have a time limit?

Is the time limit something that we could potentially see removed in the future?

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.

Thanks for the response!

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

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.

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