Using Serverless FaaS for Invoking Long-Running Jobs

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a popular computing model which abstracts out a lot of infrastructure intricacies from developers for building serverless applications, supported by all major cloud providers and many open-source software frameworks. Albeit, the numerous advantages a FaaS platform entails with it, there are a few perils associated with it as well, one of which is a timeout. Every function invocation has a default timeout, after which if the program running in the FaaS platform is still running, is terminated by the FaaS platform. This makes it's a difficult to run long running jobs/batches on a FaaS platform. This document depicts exploiting the usage of Function as a Service (FaaS) platforms for triggering and long running jobs and batches, and post processing the output of the jobs/batches.