Lambda can now pause for a year and resume where it stopped. No charges while paused.
AWS Lambda Durable Functions lets you write workflows as code. No YAML, no state machines. Just functions.
Sounds great until you've debugged one.
Simple sequential chains with retries? Sure I would pick Durable Execution. Less ceremony, just code.
But across my different backends with SNS fan-out, SQS retry queues, and dead letter handlers, I need orchestration I can see. Try debugging a durable function three retries deep with implicit state.
I learned this the hard way. A sequence of several Lambda stuck in an infinite loop pushing messages into SQS. Every failure triggered a retry. The bill spiked before anyone noticed. Christmas Eve. (Set your alerts, seriously.)
Orchestration you can't see is orchestration you can't debug.
The community calls this a Step Functions killer. I'd call it a convenience feature with a complexity ceiling.