New Year So Let's Talk About Serverless

January 2026

Happy New Year! I hope you all had a great start to 2026 and that you are keeping to your resolutions. Even if you came short, keep to it! When you fall you get back up.

I personally continued with my tradition of skiing in Tahoe for NYE. It was a pretty fun day overall and the snow was decent enough.

Now that we are in 2026, I will do some serverless predictions.

1. More Serverless AI, in particular, around agents. I think we’ll see more and more startups and established companies create serverless-native Agent platforms. I think we will see more agent orchestration layers that leverage serverless technology.

2. Advancements in serverless beyond FaaS. With the growing popularity of WASM and the graduation of Knative, I think we’ll see more startups creating serverless solutions that go beyond FaaS. We still see people associate FaaS with Serverless but Serverless is way more than Functions.
   
   I actually came across this article in The New Stack that claims that serverless is failing AI Agents. The problem is that they are associating “serverless” with “functions”. I plan on doing a more detailed analysis of this article soon but I think it shows that people are still misunderstanding serverless within the industry and are creating artificial limitations within their mind due to this misunderstanding

3. Growth in Serverless data services. We have seen services such Redpanda and Databricks grow showing that Serverless streaming as well as Serverless databases and data lakes are popular. I think we will see growth in this area to complement the growth in Agents and AI in general.

But enough about the future, let’s see what happened in the past. So let’s jump into the January 2026 serverless news...

Serverless Industry

• Can Serverless 2.0 Transform How Apps Scale in 2026? (Yes it can)

• How Serverless Architecture saved a $2.3M Deal.

• Why Serverless Risk Demands Identity-Aware Security

• Kraken uses Serverless Architecture to keep their Grid Green

Startups

• Runpod hits $120M ARR, and it began with a Reddit Post

• Cloudflare acquires Astro, which may simplify webdev on Cloudflare

Product Launches

• Microsoft releases MCP Server Support for Azure Functions

• Elastic’s Serverless Cloud is now GA on Google Cloud Marketplace

• Dev.co introduces full-stack Netlify Deployment for Jamstack

Runtimes

• WASM still Expanding Frontend Uses 10 Years Later

• What’s next for Azure Containers?

Data

• Databricks Highlights Lakebase Demo which Integrates Serverless Postgres

• Machina Sports turns Real-Time Sports Data into Engaging Fan Experiences

AI

• Luchen Technology launches a serverless fine-tuning SDK (and it costs $1.19)

• Seeweb launched a serverless GPU to overcome GPU shortages

• Cloudflare acquires Human Native, an AI data marketplace

Learning

• How to Use Serverless Computing for Your Cloud Projects from Analytics Insight

• How to build a database without a server

• Build a serverless, post-quantum Matrix homesever

Closing Thoughts

So this month, I saw more news than maybe the past few months. A lot of it was related to acquisitions and Cloudflare has been really busy. Elastic has also been busy with GCP and AWS. They are also making major AI investments to expand their offering.

Runpod is a neocloud that is growing and we saw a few others launch or expand recently. We also see companies more openly talk about their serverless journey.

All in all, I think this is great for the market. While I would be remiss to state that serverless is the what all compute should be, I think the cloud should take a “serverless first” approach and then move to other runtimes or platforms if that doesn’t work for the use case. These market trends, especially in the age of agentic AI and MCP servers, show that not only is serverless growing, but many organizations are seriously considering a “serverless first” approach.

As promised, I will try to cover more stories in depth in my newsletter for subscribers to dive deeper than this monthly recap. I wasn’t able to get to it this January but February on, I will try to do at least once every other week and then increase frequency.

See you all in February 2026!

—Photo courtesy cottonbro studio on Pexels—