Django traditionally runs on long-lived servers, but serverless computing offers an alternative where applications run in ephemeral VMs that boot on-demand and shut down after responding to requests, scaling automatically without manual management. While serverless promises cost savings through per-request billing, challenges like cold starts and historical resource limits have hindered Django adoption.
AWS Lambda now supports 90-minute function timeouts for asynchronous and event source mapping invocations on Lambda Managed Instances, a sixfold increase from the previous 15-minute limit. This enables longer-running workloads like media transcoding, financial calculations, and AI inference without requiring application re-architecture. Synchronous invocations retain the 15-minute maximum timeout.