3 papers
Serverless platforms optimized for stateless, elastic compute. But memory-bound workloads need the opposite: warm RAM, fast local disk, and sticky routing. This isn't better serverless. It's a different abstraction entirely. We describe the programming model, the platform mechanics, and how memrun implements it.
Serverless removed servers from the developer's mental model, but it also removed state from first-class support. For data-intensive workloads, that tradeoff is increasingly costly. We built memrun to prove that warm, locality-aware workers can remain serverless in feel while eliminating the state tax that stateless platforms impose.
Running faithful cloud infrastructure replicas on developer machines can significantly reduce inner-loop latency and cut non-production cloud spend. This article examines what local-first means in an infrastructure context, what the data supports, where the approach breaks down, and how to adopt it without cargo-culting.