(Author) Modal tackles how to make FaaS work, but for actual _function calls_, and also with containers that have much higher resource caps (see article: 3 CPUs vs 64 CPUs, or 10 GB RAM vs 336 GB RAM).
EC2 isn't the same compute shape. We run fast-booting (think: seconds, not minutes), dynamic sandboxed containers on a single host (think: gVisor, Firecracker) and optimized file system lookups (FUSE, distributed caching, readahead, profiling). It also means we bill by the CPU cycle, scale rapidly, and bill you only for 100% utilization. You do not manage individual VMs.
This is why scaling the limits of functions-as-a-service is quite different from scaling VMs, and that's what the content of the article focuses on.
EC2 isn't the same compute shape. We run fast-booting (think: seconds, not minutes), dynamic sandboxed containers on a single host (think: gVisor, Firecracker) and optimized file system lookups (FUSE, distributed caching, readahead, profiling). It also means we bill by the CPU cycle, scale rapidly, and bill you only for 100% utilization. You do not manage individual VMs.
This is why scaling the limits of functions-as-a-service is quite different from scaling VMs, and that's what the content of the article focuses on.