AWS Lambda - How to stop retries when there is a failure

Question

I know that when a Lambda function fails (for example when there is a time out), it tries to run the function 3 more times again. Is there any way to avoid this behavior? I' have been reading the documentation, but didn't find anyting about this.

Thanks!

Answer 1

EDITED: It's now possible to change the lambda settings to disable retries (see announcement)

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Original answer:

There isn't a way to disable retry behavior of Lambda functions. I suggest two options to deal with that:

1. Make your Lambda able to handle retry cases correctly. You can use context.AwsRequestId (or corresponding field) that will be the same when a Lambda is retried.
2. Put your Lambda inside a state machine (using AWS Step Functions). You can only then disable retries. This blog post I've written gives a more general explanation.