Holidays and Serverless
December 2025
Happy Holidays! It doesn’t matter what you celebrate (or don’t celebrate), I hope that you had a fulfilling December and had a chance to relax, reflect, and overall enjoy time with your loved ones.
I personally took a trip to the Pacific Northwest to meet my partner’s friends and family and I will say, it was a fun time! Now, I am embarking on my new New Year’s Tradition, skiing in the New Year in Tahoe!
This year has been a big year in serverless. If I had to sum up the biggest tech trend of 2025 into one word it would be AGENTS. Agentic AI has really been blowing up this year.
A quick summary on agents; they are essentially smart AI applications that can act autonomously. A great real world example would be an agent that summarizes your daily emails into a document and then books meetings onto your calendar. McKinsey has a decent write-up here if you want to do a deeper dive.
To me, serverless will be the biggest winner in this new Agentic AI world. I think we will see an even larger explosion of Agents in 2026 but that code will need to live somewhere and serverless compute will be perfect for it. After all, why worry about infrastructure when you are trying to rapidly deploy agents?
The market is already showing this. Vercel launched Fluid Compute and Inference just raised money this year as well. There are several other examples in previous newsletters so give them a read. The future is looking bright for serverless.
So let’s jump into the December 2025 serverless news...
Serverless Industry
Nscale acquires Future-Tech to accelerate global datacenter delivery
Selective Data Protection against Memory Leakage Attacks on Serverless Platforms
Scientific Papers on improving Performance Efficiency of Serverless Platforms
Startups
Akamai Technologies acquires WASM company Fermyon
Product Launches
Cloud Run continuos deploy is in Public Preview
Runtimes
Render vs Vercel, an interesting take
Data
AWS EMR Serverless eliminates local storage
IBM Acquiring Confluent, a Kafka streaming company with serverless options
AI
Vast.ai launched serverless orchestration for GPU Cloud
Learning
Architecting Planet Scale, Modern Apps in the Cloud (serverless is here)
AWS Blog - Migrate MLflow tracking servers to Amazon SageMaker AI with serverless MLflow
Closing Thoughts
This month (and year) has been a big one for us. Not just AI Agents but also other areas in serverless such as databases and compute. Cloudflare, for example, made several improvements to their cold start time and Google Cloud Run GPUs are now GA.
There are also many other stories of this year that show the explosion of AI use-cases in serverless as well as new players entering the field. We also ssaw improvements in serverless eventing and serverless databases. It’s pretty amazing to see serverless evolve from functions to being an important piece of cloud computing.
Looking towards 2026
I hinted at major changes for 2026 and here is what I think I will do starting in 2026.
I will continue to do the monthly newsletters that summarize the serverless news with links to follow. I will also provide commentary on that month. These will launch the first week of the month, covering the previous month.
Substack subscribers will see more short form newsletters where I cover a specific serverless topic or provide commentary on something in the news that I think warrants it’s own newsletter. The goal is to give you more valuable information but also make it “bite-sized” so tha you can read it on a break.
I did attempt to launch a podcast in 2025 but due to a variety of events, I was unable to do so, so I will try that again this year, likely in Q2.
I do have a YouTube Channel and may experiment with shorts in late Q1 and see how you all react to that.
Let me know your thoughts and I can’t wait to see you all in 2026
See you all in 2026!
—Photo courtesy George Dolgikh on Pexels—