Introducing Fluid compute: The power of servers, in serverless form

What this post added

This post introduces Fluid compute as Vercel's evolution beyond traditional serverless, offering a new model for web application infrastructure. Key principles include compute triggering only when needed, real-time scaling from zero to peak traffic, prioritizing existing resources before scaling new ones, billing based on actual compute usage, pre-warmed instances for reduced latency, and support for advanced tasks like streaming and post-response processing. It details how Fluid achieves smarter scaling with higher ceilings and better cost efficiency by prioritizing existing resources and mitigating uncontrolled execution risks. Cold start prevention is achieved through reduced frequency and softened impact, accelerated initialization with a Rust-based runtime, and bytecode caching. Support for advanced tasks is enabled by extending invocation lifecycles with `waitUntil`. The post also highlights dense global compute and multi-region failover, and emphasizes the open, portable, and fully supported nature of Fluid compute with Node.js and Python runtimes.