[ChrisArchitect]

A handful of firms now doing this, same sort of serverless/workers thing, makes me hesitant to be bullish on certain players like CF, Netlify, Vercel, whatever other sort of 'up n comers'. If they're all offering it, the value of one over another goes down drasically. Yeah yeah, vendor lock in, it's fine, people have options and will stay where they want, but some of the big value propositions from these firms over the last year or so has been heavily focused on this aspect of the service feels like. Is it just a case of 'there's lots of business to go around' maybe?

[rabbah]

Serverless computing is the future of cloud computing with more and more infrastructure management shifted to the provider rather than internal infra and ops teams. It isn't to say it's all or nothing, and it is a long enduring transition which is why the DigitalOcean integration between Functions and App Platform is differentiated related to some of the other vendors you mention. You don't have to choose between serverfull (containers, servers, kubernetes even) and serverless -- functions, and entirely managed services like CDNs, load balancers, containers that scale from 0 to N, SSL cert management, automatic build and deploys, rollbacks, API gateways, object storage ... and managed serverless key-value stores and databases.

So functions is really table stakes for a cloud, as are events, scheduled and background functions. You've seen this play out with every cloud provider since the arrival of AWS Lambda. Our goal is to make it scale, make it cheap, and make it secure with DigitalOcean developer simplicity and so you are right, a corner stone of this endeavor is the developer experience and integration with cloud services because a cloud application consumes all of these services. As these become core competencies for a cloud, the integrations between all the services only get better and deliver more value to the customer.