Fluid: Eliminating cold starts with intelligent compute management
Vercel introduces Fluid, a new compute approach powered by platform-level optimizations that delivers near-zero cold starts for 99.37% of requests, solving a core serverless limitation without requiring always-on instance costs.
Cold starts have long been the Achilles’ heel of traditional serverless. It’s not just the delay itself, but the delay happens. Cold starts happen when someone new discovers your app, when traffic is just starting to pick up, or during those critical first interactions that shape whether people stick around or convert.when
Traditional serverless platforms shut down inactive instances after a few minutes to save costs. But then when traffic returns, users are met with slow load times while new instances spin up. This is where developers would normally have to make a choice. Save money at the expense of unpredictable performance, or pay for always-on servers that increase costs and slow down scalability.
But what if you didn't have to choose? That’s why we built a better way.
Powered by , Vercel delivers If they do happen, they are faster and shorter-lived than on a traditional serverless platform.Fluid computezero cold starts for 99.37% of all requests. Fewer than one request in a hundred will ever experience a cold start.
Through a combination of platform-level optimizations, we've made cold starts a solved problem in practice. What follows is how that’s possible and why it works at every scale.
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