[blq10]

The big place it shines for compute tasks is workloads with high variability.

As long as you can select a p99 for timeouts that's sane, lambda does a really good job handling highly heterogeneous workflows in general.

So if a request could take 10ms or multiple minutes depending on Reasons(TM) - lambda makes a lot of sense because you don't have to overprovision for theoretical peak demand, and a swamp of expensive requests is isolated from your cheap requests.