Time-boxed execution

As we explained previously, serverless systems' building blocks are ephemeral functions that execute in a time-boxed manner. The corollary to this is obvious; each function has to have a well-defined execution boundary. So, the ideal candidates to run as Functions as a Service are deterministic computations that are guaranteed to return execution results in a finite amount of time. Adopters have to be careful when architecting long-running, probabilistic jobs in a serverless manner. Running such jobs can incur heavy costs, which defeats the purpose of adopting serverless.

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