Engineering @ Scale — 2026-05-26#

Signal of the Day#

Vercel slashed its build provisioning times from 90 seconds to 5 by abandoning standard containers for AWS Firecracker microVMs. They proved that aggressively aligning your architecture to your true threat model—in this case, hostile multi-tenancy—justifies the steep engineering cost of building from primitives, ultimately unlocking optimizations like warm pooling that off-the-shelf orchestrators can’t support safely.