Netlify has announced the availability of Background Functions in Beta for customers on Pro plans and above. These functions allow developers to set up serverless functions that can run asynchronously, with a maximum execution time of 15 minutes, enabling more performant and responsive web applications. The new feature complements existing Netlify Functions, which already allow developers to run AWS Lambda functions directly from Netlify without coordinating API gateways or deployments. Background Functions are ideal for tasks such as batch processing, web scraping, and interfacing with slow APIs, and can be written in JavaScript or Go. To use them, developers simply need to add the `-background` suffix to their function name, which will deploy a background function that returns an immediate client response on successful invocation, then continues running in the background until it completes asynchronously. With this new feature, developers can give immediate feedback to users while serverless functions complete long-running tasks on their own time.