Giving Flowers to Serverless

May 2026

Welcome to May! One more month until Summer! For me, May means the ending of the ski season. Yes, we go up to Tahoe one last weekend to clean out the house and enjoy the surroundings. We drove out to the Nevada side and took a roughly 3-mile walk around the lake.

I am a city boy through and through but I also love nature. It’s always fun to just get outside and see the world beyond data. Maybe one of these days I will buy a lakehouse and get one of these view permanently.

Speaking of lake houses (like that segue?), Databricks and serverless databases in general were big this month. Seriously, when I did research, every other story was somehow tied back to Databricks. I actually just chose what I considered the best ones.

But Databricks, Pinecone, Naver Cloud and SAP all have expanded their serverless database offering. This means that people like saving money without giving up efficiency.

Of course AI still dominated the news but we also received some runtime information such as DigitalOcean’s new offering. So let’s jump right into it shall we?

Serverless Industry

• Cloud modernization is advancing. Utilization isn’t

• Cloudflare's Sunil Pai on Building Science Fiction

Startups

• Pinecone Launches First Serverless Region in Asia with New Singapore Cloud Region, Bringing the Knowledge Infrastructure for AI to the Asia-Pacific Market

• Trigger.dev's Eric Allam on Durable AI Agents

• Serverless AI infrastructure startup Modal Labs seals $355M funding round

Product Launches

• Introducing Runtime Threat Detection for Google Cloud Run

• Serverless Compute for Notebooks, Jobs, and Pipelines: Latest Launches and What’s Next

Runtimes

• Databricks Reimagines Serverless Compute

• New Inference Engine by DigitalOcean Enhances AI Workload Efficiency

• Temporal reveals a serverless option for its Durable Execution platform

Data

• SAP to acquire Dremio to build apache iceberg-native data foundation for AI

• Rethinking Distributed Systems for Serverless Performance and Reliability

• Why AWS scrapped OpenSearch’s architecture to chase agent workloads

• Naver Cloud Launches Fully Managed Serverless Database Service

AI

• Zyphra and AMD Partner to Power Zyphra Cloud on AMD Instinct™ MI355X GPUs

• Nebius launches AI Cloud 3.5 featuring serverless AI to speed up development times

• CoreWeave Expands AI Cloud Platform with Sandboxes Execution Layer

Learning

• Efficient Serverless Federated Learning with Edge Model Migration on Non-IID Data

• Nine Entertainment’s journey: Achieving 98% cost savings with Amazon ElastiCache Serverless for Valkey

Closing Thoughts

I found that a Korean company such as Naver Cloud launching a serverless database as interesting. I never really pegged South Korea as a country with a large cloud presence much less a serverless one. That’s probably due to my own ignorance but I ultimately found the story interesting.

It seems like launching sandboxes for agentic compute will be a big deal with serverless. After all, you need a safe area for an agent to execute arbitrary code.

Modal is one of the neoclouds leading the "serverless inference” game so their 9-figure raise suggests that the market is finding value in it. Even Digital Ocean wants to enter the inference-as-a-service market.

Serverless was traditionally about computer but now, in the AI world, it’s about data. I look forward to seeing what new startups pop up and what growth we continue to see!

—Photo courtesy Enock Gabriel on Pexels—