AWS Lambda durable functions
Preserve progress despite interruptions
What is AWS Lambda durable functions
Simplify building multi-step applications and AI workflows with AWS Lambda durable functions, all within Lambda's existing programming model. Durable functions automatically checkpoint progress, suspend execution for up to one year during long-running tasks, and recover from failures. You do not need to manage additional infrastructure or write custom state management and error handling code, allowing you to innovate faster. With durable functions, you can create order processing systems that survive failures, coordinate microservices transactions with automatic rollback, or implement AI-assisted approval workflows that can suspend execution for human decisions.
Benefits
Simplify building multi-step applications and AI workflows with familiar programming patterns in your preferred programming language.
Strengthen application resilience through built-in error handling, automatic retries, and recovery after failures.
Enhance operational efficiency by suspending and resuming executions during wait periods like human approvals, charging only for active compute time. Easily observe progress of your durable functions executions in the Lambda console.
Features
Write, test, and debug durable functions using your preferred programming languages and tools.
Enable durable functions through a simple configuration setting when creating a Lambda function. Enhance your business logic with new Lambda event handler primitives like “steps” and “waits”.
Use “Steps” to checkpoint progress with automatic retries and recovery from the last known checkpoint.
Use "wait" and “callback” patterns to suspend execution for up to one year when waiting for external events, such as human-in-the-loop AI workflows or order processing.
Use cases
Build resilient payment flows that maintain transaction state through failures and handle retries automatically. Coordinate multi-step authorization, fraud checks, and settlement across payment providers with full auditability across steps.
Create multi-step AI workflows that chain model calls, incorporate human feedback, and handle long-running tasks deterministically during failures. Automatically resume after suspension, and only pay for active execution time.
Coordinate order processing across inventory, payment, shipping, and notification systems with built-in resilience. Automatically handle partial failures, preserve order state despite interruptions, and efficiently wait for external events without consuming compute resources.
Build reliable workflows for employee onboarding, loan approvals, and compliance processes that span days or weeks. Maintain workflow state across human approvals, system integrations, and scheduled tasks while providing full visibility into process status and history.
Amplience
Amplience helps retailers create, manage, and deliver content at scale, processing billions of requests daily. To power Amplience Workforce, an agentic content automation engine built for the full content supply chain, Amplience chose AWS Lambda durable functions.
Their workflows are user-defined, AI-powered, and highly dynamic, where each customer configures their own sequence at runtime rather than following a fixed pipeline. A typical workflow orchestrates commerce content tasks such as generating product descriptions, standardizing supplier product images, with built-in governance. Durable functions powers this with built-in checkpointing, retries, and state persistence.
In just two weeks, the team went from proof of concept to production-ready, demonstrating linear scaling up to hundreds of workflows per second.
“Delays in creating or publishing content mean products don’t go live. Durable functions gives us the reliability that we need so our customers don’t lose workflows, even across long-running pipelines with human review steps.”
- Darren Lee, SVP Engineering, Amplience
Sola Security
Sola Security, a contextual AI assistant for security teams, uses AWS Lambda durable functions to power large-scale data integrations across customer environments. Built on AWS serverless, Sola adopted durable functions as the backbone for its most complex operations, including orchestrating multi-stage data extraction, automated user-defined workflows, and critical backend procedures. Durable functions lets Sola's developers define stateful workflows using familiar programming languages and their existing libraries, then build, debug, and iterate using the tools they already know. Since adopting durable functions, Sola has scaled from 10,000 to over 100,000 daily workflow runs without changing how their team operates.
"Lambda durable functions changed how we build distributed systems. We migrated our most complex operations and it just worked. Our developers moved faster, and our operational model stayed intact."
- Itay Waisman, Data & Integrations Team Leader, Sola Security
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