As quickly as I can:
- AWS Lambda is great: it allows you to run server-side code without really running a server. This is what “serverless” largely means.
- Netlify Functions run on AWS Lambda and make them way easier to use. For example, you just chuck some scripts into a folder they deploy when you push to your main branch. Plus you get logs.
- Netlify Functions used to be limited to a 10-second execution time, even though Lambda’s can run 15 minutes.
- Now, you can run 15-minute functions on Netlify also, by appending
-backgroundto the filename likemy-function-background.js. (You can write in Go also.) - This means you can do long-ish running tasks, like spin up a headless browser and scrape some data, process images to build into a PDF and email it, sync data across systems with batch API requests… or anything else that takes a lot longer than 10 seconds to do.
