I updated my post. I meant with "deploy as VPS" "deploy as a (virtual private) server with a service like render, heroku".
I agree the sys admin stuff, no thanks. the appeal of "serverless edge", at least to me, is ease of deployment. but, that ease of deployment is tooling / git integration rather than the underlying architecture.
the benefit of "your functions are globally distributed" has yet to appeal to me. for large ecommerce maybe. but then again, just deploy your servers in a distributed fashion which is "easy" if no state persistent is involved and tooling like fly.io is emerging.
to be honest I think much of this is also solved by thinking of VPS as "docker compose on a VPS" (or whatever container tech you want to use to abstract away the bare-metal sysadmin stuff).
I honestly think with containers there is much less need for stuff like render and heroku, even more so if you use SQLite and remove the hosted database complexity.
In fact in many ways it's even better - for instance the ability to run locally with an exact bit-for-bit production environment. Can't really do that with a PaaS.
I agree the sys admin stuff, no thanks. the appeal of "serverless edge", at least to me, is ease of deployment. but, that ease of deployment is tooling / git integration rather than the underlying architecture.
the benefit of "your functions are globally distributed" has yet to appeal to me. for large ecommerce maybe. but then again, just deploy your servers in a distributed fashion which is "easy" if no state persistent is involved and tooling like fly.io is emerging.