What is Back pressure?
Backpressure happens when your Lambda is getting more events than it can process fast enough.
Managing back pressure in AWS Lambda is a real thing you need to plan for, especially when your Lambdas are triggered by event sources like SQS, Kinesis, DynamoDB streams, etc.
How to Manage Back Pressure
Tune the Event Source Settings
Control Lambda Concurrency
Use SQS as a Buffer
Implement a Retry / DLQ Strategy
Configure a Dead-Letter Queue (DLQ) for failed events.
Use maximum retry attempts to avoid infinite retries.
For SQS, use visibility timeout + redrive policy correctly.
Scaling Out Properly
If processing is slow due to heavy workloads inside your Lambda (e.g., heavy I/O, external API calls):
Make your Lambda lighter/faster.
Scale horizontally (more Lambdas in parallel).
Move heavy work to async patterns (e.g., S3 uploads + EventBridge triggers).
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