November and re:Invent 2025 brought us the “holy grail” of serverless: AWS Lambda Durable Functions.
This feature introduces “Stateful Serverless” directly into the Lambda runtime. By using the new withDurableExecution wrapper, you can now write long-running workflows that persist for up to one year. When your function hits a context.wait() call, the compute is suspended and you stop paying—until the event or human approval resumes it.
It effectively replaces many complex Step Functions use cases with pure, testable code. We also got Graviton5, which is 25% faster than Graviton4 and features the Nitro Isolation Engine. This engine uses formal verification to provide mathematical proof of workload isolation.
November proved that the line between “Serverless” and “Infrastructure” is officially gone. Everything is just “Intent” now.