Vercel launches ‘Fluid Compute' to flawlessly balance cost, speed, and scale

Vercel, the company responsible for the relentlessly popular developer framework Next.js, has unveiled its latest boundary-pushing feature – Fluid Compute. This new offering puts a serverful spin on serverless norms, promising reduced costs and efficient resource utilization for developers worldwide.

The old ways: Traditional serverless cloud models, while effective, bring challenges such as over-provisioning and cold start latency. They offer auto-scaling and pay-as-you-go benefits, yet grapple with initialization delays and idle resource wastage. Meanwhile, more legacy dedicated servers guarantee availability, but often lead to cost inefficiencies due to being "always on" and provisioned 24/7.

Meet Fluid Compute:Fluid Compute emerges as a whole new solution, combining the best of both worlds. Essentially, it swaps isolated function invocation for high-performance mini-servers, maximizing throughput while minimizing cold starts. The result? Up to 85% reduced compute costs for early adopters, according to Vercel.

Some key features: Fluid operates on principles of resource efficiency and cost-effectiveness. It triggers only as needed, aligning usage with demand, offers real-time scaling capabilities (handling zero to peak traffic fluidly), and billing is usage-based, avoiding the common pitfall of resource wastage.

Early feedback: As with most Vercel launches, the online engineering community has a lot to say. On Reddit, most of the debate centered around the pricing, efficiency, and longterm viability compared to Vercel's edge functions. In one thread, users requested to ELI5 (explain like I'm five), which resulted in analogies from "restaurant waiters as functions", to more in depth video walk-throughs. Perhaps most poignantly, user pverdeb summed it up, saying, "It accelerates growth of large accounts, and everyone else gets to ride the wave. So overall it is very good news for most people in this sub....I think 'Fluid Compute' is more about their overall paradigm than a specific feature or features."