Too Long; Didn't Read
AWS Lambda <a href="http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html" target="_blank">limits</a> the maximum execution time of a single invocation to <strong>5 minutes</strong>. Whilst this limit might be raised in the future, it’s likely that you’ll still have to consider timeouts for any long-running tasks. For this reason, I personally think it’s a good thing that the current limit is too low for many long running tasks — it forces you to consider edge cases early and avoid the trap of thinking “it <em>should</em> be long enough to do X” without considering possible failure modes.