Netlify Background Functions

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Chris Coyier on

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 -background to the filename like my-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.