Microservices Doesn't Mean Lambda Everything

Here's a scenario that might be familiar. A team is building on a microservices architecture. Things are moving. There's momentum. Then a long-running background process starts failing — timeouts, cost spikes, instability. Someone raises the concern: Lambda is ephemeral. It's designed for short, simple, one-time tasks. It runs, finishes, goes back to sleep. A long-running daily job is the wrong fit. The lead's response: No, that's not what Lambda is for. Then, in the same breath, he repeated the same explanation back: Lambda is ephemeral, it handles short, quick tasks. Then he used it as the justification for keeping the Lambda in place. The DevOps engineer in the room, who shared the same concern, was instructed to make it work regardless. I was in that room. And what followed was predictable in hindsight: costs climbed, the system became increasingly fragile, and eventually the whole thing came down. Not because microservices was the wrong pattern. But because the team had confused a