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Overcoming AWS Lambda Limitations with Fargate

January 5, 2023

Lambda’s hard limits — a 15-minute maximum execution time and 500 MB of storage — rule it out for a chunk of real-world workloads. Pairing it with Fargate removes both constraints while keeping the architecture serverless.

The pattern

1. A Lambda function triggers on an event source.
2. It places the event onto an SQS queue.
3. Fargate consumes the queue and does the actual processing.

Where this matters

A good example: downloading a file up to 1 GB, processing it, and uploading the result to S3 — practically impossible within Lambda’s hard limits on its own, but straightforward once Fargate is doing the heavy lifting and Lambda is just the trigger.

Delegating the long-running or storage-heavy part of the job to Fargate, while keeping Lambda as the lightweight entry point, lets a team keep the serverless model without fighting Lambda’s limits.