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AWS › Lambda & Serverless

How does Lambda concurrency work, and what is the difference between reserved concurrency and the account level concurrency limit?

Intermediate

Answer

Lambda's concurrency represents the number of simultaneous executions of your function that can run at any given moment, with every AWS account having an overall regional concurrency limit shared across all functions, and reserved concurrency lets you guarantee a specific portion of that overall limit exclusively for a particular function, both protecting that function from being starved of capacity by other functions and also capping how much that specific function can scale, which can be useful to prevent it from overwhelming a downstream resource like a database.
aws lambda put-function-concurrency --function-name critical-function --reserved-concurrent-executions 50
Real-world example A company reserves fifty concurrent executions specifically for its critical payment processing Lambda function, ensuring it always has guaranteed capacity available even if other, less critical functions in the same account experience an unexpected traffic spike.

Common follow-ups: What happens to a Lambda invocation if the concurrency limit is reached?;How do you request an increase to your account's overall Lambda concurrency limit?