Compute — Serverless

Serverless (functions / managed compute that scales to zero): AWS Lambda, GCP Cloud Functions/Cloud Run jobs patterns, Cloudflare Workers (also see Cloudflare), Azure Functions, etc.

Fit

• Short, event-triggered work (HTTP, queue, cron)
• Spiky traffic; you don’t want always-on VMs
• Team accepts provider limits (timeouts, payload size, cold starts)

Skip when

• Long-running workers, sticky websocket farms, or heavy local disk — prefer Docker / Clouds
• You need exotic networking only K8s buys — and you have ops for it (Kubernetes)

Starter DAG

flowchart TD
  A[Name the event and max runtime] --> B[Thin handler + local invoke tests]
  B --> C[repos ci: unit + package artifact]
  C --> D[repos secrets: ESC OIDC to cloud]
  D --> E[Deploy to one env]
  E --> F[observe-it: errors, duration, cold starts]
  F --> G[stage/ship promote if multi-env]

Skills

kiss · repos ci · repos secrets setup · test-it · observe-it · stage-it / ship-it · diagnose-bug on prod failures

Watchouts

• Timeouts and retry storms
• Secret injection at invoke time (ESC), not baked into zip
• Idempotency for at-least-once delivery