How to control asynchronous invocations of your AWS Lambda functions

I have a serverless process that runs in a row — one Lambda runs and before it ends, it invokes another Lambda. Due to rate limits and other errors, I needed to know if the invocation was successful, but I didn’t want to wait until the new Lambda ended. This was challenging.

The other annoying thing was that the number of running Lambdas was increasing out of control, even though I should have one Lambda alive at a time (maybe two, because I start a new Lambda and only then close the current one — an overlap of few milliseconds).

There are two types of lambda invocations: Sync (“RequestResponse”) and Async (“Event”).

My next attempt was with the Sync invocation. In order to know if the Lambda invocation succeeded, I needed to wait for the new Lambda to end. So I used a little trick:

Other solutions that not discussed in this post:

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