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Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

    > ...than running a heavy weight vm.

Serverless containers are a thing (GCP Cloud Run, Azure Container Apps) and seems like the right analogue.

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Those offer a more streamlined developer experience than traditional cloud VMs, but still require just as much compute resources (apart from being able to scale to zero if you can tolerate cold starts). E.g., you still have to choose how many data centers they run in and which ones, which is laden with tradeoffs, whereas every Cloudflare Worker runs in every Cloudflare DC, for free.

Cloudflare workers don't have cold starts? How do they manage that? I thought they'd still have firecracker or something underneath. Are they trusting the V8 sandbox that much?

Yes, they're trusting it that much (https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/reference/security...). This is nonzero controversial. Of course, spinning up a new isolate takes more than zero time, but it's quick enough that handling it in parallel with the TLS handshake eliminates most of the cold-start time (https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-cold-starts-with-clo...), and also it's less likely to be needed if there's already an instance running somewhere (https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-cold-starts-2-shard-...).

Cloud Run scales to zero and can handle concurrent requests. I'd make the case that as long as you point a scheduled HTTP request to the Cloud Run instance and keep it "hot", handing an incoming request off to a thread sitting in a thread pool is always going to be faster.

You can also do that with Cloudflare Workers if you want.

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