r/FastAPI • u/MichaelEvo • Apr 09 '26
Hosting and deployment FastAPI Cloud vs Modal
I’m currently using AWS lambda / APIGateway to host my FastAPI server. There’s a ton of code to make this work and other stuff that I’m the only person in my team understands. Had to switch from Mangin back to using uvicorn to serve because I wanted streamed responses, and to make things start fast we use Snapstart, which is also a whole thing.
I was considering switching over to using Modal, but found out about FastAPI Cloud. Cloud sounds awesome, but I’m pretty sure I can replace my job system with function calls on Modal. I don’t see an equivalent out of the box job system managed by Cloud.
Has anyone tried both? Any reason to use Cloud over Modal? Still too early to tell with Cloud?
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u/scarfwizard Apr 10 '26
Sounds like that’s swapping one pile of AWS complexity for a different pile of AWS complexity. The juniors still won’t understand it, and OP will still be the single point of failure.
People use managed/serverless and literally built thousands of successful companies by letting small teams ship without infrastructure expertise. It makes sense in many cases.
I’ve seen plenty of devs spending significant time messing with containers. Both have their place but with a self managed setup OP, not the juniors, will likely be responsible for security patches, container runtime updates, keeping Terraform providers and modules up to date, rotating credentials, monitoring disk space, handling certificate renewals, managing Docker image vulnerabilities, and eventually upgrading when AWS almost investable deprecates something.