That's exciting!

Out of curiosity, have you explored the possibility of a serverless orchestration layer? That's one of the most appealing parts of Step Functions. We have many large workflows that run just a couple times a day and take several hours alongside a few short workflows that run under a minute and are executed more frequently during peak hours. Step Functions ends up being really cost effective even through many state transitions because most of the time, the orchestrator is idle.

Coming from an existing setup where everything is serverless, the fixed cost to add serverfull stuff feels like a lot. For a HA setup, it'd be 3 EC2 instances and 3 NAT gateways spread across 3 AZs. Then multiply that for each environment and dev account, and it ends up being pretty steep. You can cut costs a bit by going single AZ for non-prod envs, but still...

I couldn't find a pricing model for Restate Cloud, but I'm including "managed services" under the definition of serverless for my purposes. Maybe that offering can fill the gap, but then it does raise security concerns if the orchestration is not happening on our own infra.

Yeah, definitely. We would like to have modes of operation where Restate puts its state only in S3. In that world, it could potentially run for short periods, and sleep when there's no work to do.

Cloud only has an early access free tier right now. We intend to make Cloud into a highly multitenant offering, which will make the cost of a user that isn't doing anything with their cluster effectively 0. In that world, we can do really cost effective consumption pricing for low-volume serverless use cases. Absolutely this requires trust, and some users will always want to self host, and we want to make that as easy and cost effective as possible. Its worth noting that we should be able to support client side encryption for journal entries, in time - in which case, you don't have to trust us nearly as much.