Netlify Background Functions: 15-Minute Serverless Tasks Made Easy
AWS Lambda has long enabled running server-side code without actually managing a server—the essence of what “serverless” means. Netlify Functions build on Lambda by simplifying the developer experience: you drop scripts into a folder, deploy on a push to your main branch, and get logs out of the box. But Netlify Functions previously capped execution at 10 seconds, even though Lambda supports runs up to 15 minutes.
Now, that limit is gone. You can run 15-minute functions on Netlify too, simply by appending -background to your function’s filename—my-function-background.js works, and you can also write in Go.
This unlocks longer-running tasks: spinning up a headless browser to scrape data, processing images into a PDF then emailing it, syncing data across systems with batch API calls—really anything that takes considerably more than 10 seconds to complete.
