Serverless

Serverless is not the recommended approach for Vela projects. Vela projects are designed as traditional full-stack applications: a database and an application. With the database running alongside the application, we see baseline performance that's significantly better than a serverless PaaS paired with a hosted database. We believe it's the better starting point for most projects.

Regardless, with some limitations, serverless can be a viable option:

Limitations

Database latency overhead

When using a serverless PaaS, the database is hosted on a remote server. This introduces latency overhead on every request.

Reduced caching

A long-running server process can cache data in memory and avoid database queries. This is not possible with serverless, as the server is terminated after each request.

Automatic migrations

With separate database and application hosts, automatic migrations are not supported. You'll need to manually run migrations after each deploy.

PocketBase hosting

We recommend PocketHost as a hosted solution for PocketBase. Set up a database instance and then configure the POCKETBASE_URL environment variable in your project.