This is just an ad for "Viduli, The AI-native cloud platform"
The discussion itself is off-topic for this community anyway. Who would even think about using "serverless" for self-hosting?
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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I use serverless via knative in my homelab...
Why wouldn’t serverless technologies be relevant to the self hosted community?
The discussion is off topic for the same reason web development software patterns or the benefits of choosing one language over another aren't really relevant to the selfhosting community. Because most self-hosters don't develop the software they host, they set up existing software. Serverless technology itself might be relevant, if there was a project using that, but how the architectural decision impacts software development is not really relevant to self-hosters.
On the contrary, lots of us write our own scripts and programs. And when considering how to self host that software, serverless is a perfectly valid choice.
Just because many self hosters are hobbyists who are only capable of using things off the shelf doesn’t make self hosting infrastructure outside the scope of… selfhosting lol
I'll rephrase it more clearly then. Selfhosting focuses on the hosting aspect of software. !programming@programming.dev focuses on the development aspect of software. This article talks about the architectural decision made during development. It doesn't talk about how to host serverless. It doesn't even talk about why you wouldn't want to selfhost serverless. It talks about bad software patterns the come with serverless. It also talks about the cost of running those things but even that is geared more towards enterprise level devops people.
It might be an interesting read from the software developer perspective but it's not interesting from the selfhoster perspective, because the article has nothing to do with selfhosting.
I can't think of a single open source / self hostable app that needed, or even had an option to deploy as a function. I have seen FaaS projects though, but they deploy to docker.
I'm sure 'serverless' has a good time and place to be used, but in my experience it has just always been the worse choice.
"But we need to be able to scale!"
Sure, but we're not in a place where we're getting anywhere near early mySpace / Facebook / Google style growth. Just get a regular ass cheap VPS and stick your service on it; if you need to expand upgrade the VPS. If it's starts getting serious then let's look at compartmentalizing and distributing it if we need to.
It really is such a cool concept. The autism in me hates the name though because there's always a server. I wish it were called a "container-based service" or even just "containers" instead of serverless to be more direct. Perhaps even "web functions."
There's so much big talk about scale but really, scaling is not that important to 99% of businesses I've worked at. You're not a startup. Your typical server has a huge amount of resources if managed appropriately. I guarantee and would bet money that you'll never have a million users let alone a billion using your medical coding web app. Like, sit down!
Absolutely. People really sleep on just how much traffic a simple low end server running a PHP framework can handle. I've ran systems with a million users (combined across multiple domains and clients but still) and it was just fine with a single database server and a few web servers. They would have needed to hit the tens of millions of users before serious refactoring or rewriting would have ever been necessary to consider.
Problem is containers mean OCI/Docker containers for most people, which distinctly are little OSs (the kernel is shared), where serverless creates a common OS stack and application framework as well.
If you build for a containerised environment, standing up your service in Kubernetes with HPA gives you all the scalability (and potentially cost) benefits of serverless without all the drawbacks.
What does this have to do with self-hosting?
A poor architect blames their tools. Serverless is an option among many, and it's good for occasional atomic workloads. And, like many hot new things, it's built with huge customers in mind and sold to everyone else who wants to be the next huge customer. It's the architect's job to determine whether functions are fit for their purposes. Also,
Here's the fundamental problem with serverless: it forces you into a request-response model that most real applications outgrew years ago.
IDK what they consider a "real" application but plenty of software still operates this way and it works just fine. If you need a lot of background work, or low latency responses, or scheduled tasks or whatever then use something else that suits your needs, it doesn't all have to be functions all the time.
And if you have a higher-up that got stars in their eyes and mandated a switch to serverless, you have my pity. But if you run a dairy and you switch from cows to horses, don't blame the horses when you can't get milk.
It's a dystopian government's dream.
I don't know about you but this seems ai generated
Are you saying that it isn't a picture of the cloud (or of an IA barrister in a British court)?
Did we culturally forget that digital art and photoshopping exist for a minute?
Yes.
If we learned anything from the luddites is that you can permanently stop any technology you don't like if you're just really really vocal about it.
?
This is aI generated?
I don't know about you, but I really, really, really don't care if a website wants to make its articles look more appealing by throwing in some animates.
When building an application, consider all options. Serverless is great for background tasks that can be broken up into smaller pieces that you would otherwise need to scale up for main instances to handle, or scale up/down additional instances. It's great for running background reports that you do t want to build a bunch of routes for.
I would never choose serverless for the whole app architecture, but I might choose one host over another of the distinguishing feature was serverless. It's really nice to have the option.
What wasnt conveniently covered is what happens when your container goes down and how to architect recovery. Your simple flow diagram is no longer simple.
I generally agree with the rest of the article.