Spring Cleaning: Getting Rid of those Pesky Servers

April 2026

April was pretty awesome as I went to Google Cloud Next as a speaker! That’s right! I finally got the chance to speak at Next.

No you do not get bonus points for guessing what I spoke about. I had the honor of joining Guzmán Brasó of Televisa Univision and James Connell of Pulumi on stage. We essentially talked about how Cloud Run can scale to support enterprise workloads. You can click the link and see a summary of the talk (the entirety of the talk wasn’t recorded) and see the slides!

Now, let’s address the elephant in the room. There were A TON of Cloud Run announcements at Next that I think you would find amazing. BUT, I am committed to try and keep this blog vendor neutral so instead of talking about it here, I will just link the announcements here (and I will give equal time to our competitor).

Anyway, what happened this month. You know, this month wasn’t all that AI heavy surprisingly. Which is good because at Next I heard “AI” just about every other sentence. There are definitely what I would call “AI Adjacent” stories but not strictly AI. Things like “databases for AI” were talked about. That’s a good thing because AI isn’t just about the models but rather about everything that surrounds it.

The industry is definitely growing and we are looking to see what happens next.

Serverless Industry

• Edge Computing and Serverless Hosting Gaining Ground in 2026

• How Serverless is Compressing Developer Workflow at Hyperscale Companies

• Inside Capital One’s shift to a ‘serverless-first’ operating model

Startups

• CarryAI’s Serverless Vision-Language Models Signal a New Era of On-Device AI

• How AI.cc’s Serverless Unified API Delivers Scalability and Savings

• Featherless.ai pulls in $20M to scale serverless hosting for open-source AI models

Product Launches

• Nebius Aether AI Cloud Upgrade Tests Momentum And Long Term Growth

• Argentum taps Rafay to orchestrate global GPU capacity as it pushes into neocloud territory

• Litmus Launches Litmus Edge Bridge for Databricks Lakehouse to Accelerate Data Pipelines for Industrial AI

• Cloudflare debuts EmDash to challenge aging WordPress with AI-native CMS

Runtimes

• Amazon ElastiCache Serverless now supports IPv6 and dual stack connectivity

• AWS to turn down AppRunner

Data

• Komprise Targets AI Data Preparation With KAPPA Serverless Services

• ZoomInfo and Pinecone Bring Real-Time, AI-Powered Contact Recommendations to Go-to-Market Teams

• Commvault cosies up to Google’s Cloud

• Amazon Redshift Serverless is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) and Canada West (Calgary) regions

AI

• Databricks Launches Agent Bricks Enterprise Agent Platform

• DigitalOcean Reports Rate Limiting on Serverless Inference

• New open source Python tool Runpod Flash eliminates containers for faster AI dev

Learning

• Batch Inference: The 50% Cost Cut You Keep Putting Off

• How Observability and Telemetry Can Enhance the Practice of Software Engineering

• Serverless Inference: A Smarter Way to Scale AI Workloads

Closing Thoughts

This month we saw a lot of changes. Cloudflare fired shots at Wordpress by creating a fully serverless Javascript CMS. Runpod Flash promises to use faster delivery without containers (looking forward to testing that). CapitalOne continues to grow it’s serverless infrastructure. Serverless gained cloud market share in 2026.

I think this is signaling to the market that serverless is the way to go for agentic workloads. It seems that standard cloud applications were geared towards containerization and while serverless say some of that share, it wasn’t what it could have been. This new AI wave may very well be the tipping point that makes the serverless model the new cloud standard.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I look forward to seeing what happens next. Join me in May for the next summary newsletter and stay tuned for my ad-hoc. See you soon!

—Photo courtesy Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels—