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Discussion on: Sending Email with Netlify Functions

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timtrautman profile image
Tim Trautman

Great post!

I've loved playing around with Netlify functions -- it makes working with AWS lambda so much more approachable (for me, at least.) And it's neat to see how quickly it lets you build out small apps with backend functionality (like email!) without having to worry about the operations of standing up a backend server.

But, on the flip side, have you run into any difficulties with them? I've found debugging to be a bit more difficult and time-consuming, but that might subside as I become more familiar with them and as netlify dev gets a bit more mature.

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jennapederson profile image
Jenna Pederson

Thanks for the feedback, Tim!

Such a great question too. I have one live project (other than this playground) using a few functions and with not much traffic, so I haven't had a lot of experience with where it falls down. One thing I found (for that particular implementation) was that since there was not much traffic hitting those functions, they would occasionally fail/timeout as they were spinning up. Another use case I've heard they are not well suited for is long-running processes because of this low timeout value.

I started digging into this because I wanted to learn more about that specifically so that I can make better decisions on whether to go down this route for future projects. Stay tuned for a future post on!

And I'm all ears on where you find it tricky or where it doesn't work well, beyond the debugging process.