# Tiderun — What Does Streaming-First Serverless FaaS Look Like?

*2025-02-06 — Tech — By Kim*

> Building Tiderun, a streaming-first serverless FaaS platform using V8 and Rust, designed for AI workloads where streaming is a first-class primitive rather than an afterthought.
On the side of game development I had some fun and built an entire startup and tech stack: [tiderun.ai](https://tiderun.ai/)

It's based on streaming <Abbr explanation="Function as a Service, no server over here (it is elsewhere).">FaaS</Abbr>  — serverless architecture with AI as a first-class citizen.

### The core question

I wanted to explore how you combine JavaScript runtimes with Rust executables. How would you best serve <Abbr explanation="Server-Sent Events, AI loves this one cool trick.">SSE</Abbr> streaming through FaaS in these interesting times — where Europe is also considering breaking away from US cloud dependency?

<Abbr explanation="Retrieval-Augmented Generation, make AI less dumb sometimes.">RAGs</Abbr>, prompt-cache gateways, all sorts of interesting language model patterns to work with. The tooling landscape is moving fast and the infrastructure needs to keep up.

### Streaming as a first-class primitive

Traditional FaaS is request-response. You call a function, it runs, it returns. But AI workloads are fundamentally different — they stream. Token by token, chunk by chunk.

<Abbr explanation="Amazon Web Services, maybe the devil maybe not.">AWS</Abbr> has streaming for their Lambdas but it feels like an afterthought. Streaming isn't a first-class primitive there.

Tiderun is my exploration of what it looks like when you design for streaming from the ground up.

### What is it then?

In its simplicity — I built a streaming-first serverless architecture using V8 runtime sandbox isolation at its core. Combined with Rust for the fun and practical benefits of streaming callbacks and memory management.

Think Supabase or Vercel if they were a standalone cloud.

One little function paired to an endpoint, running in isolation but sharing the same runtime container for many functions and calls in parallel. And streaming responses the whole time.

Deno has been doing an amazing job for the Rust community when it comes to managing Google's V8 and supplying an <Abbr explanation="Software Development Kit, a thing that makes me happy.">SDK</Abbr> layer to bootstrap and inject all sorts of functionality on top of it. For example, your own internal SDK functions exposed directly to JavaScript but running in Rust. Similar to how AWS and Cloudflare do it under the hood.

### The sovereign cloud problem

I have an entire FaaS infrastructure designed for the sovereign cloud. The problem is that I don't own a cloud. *And don't want to start one right now.*

It's more of an orchestration layer that could be applied to any cloud to have a standalone runtime up and going. And of course an LLM to generate these functions for us.
A nice dashboard layer to manage and monitor the infrastructure, inference chat capabilities to create new functions and manage existing ones.

But the question is real and getting more relevant by the day. As Europe considers its relationship with US cloud providers, there's a genuine need for infrastructure that can run independently.
Streaming-first serverless is an interesting piece of that puzzle.

### ...honestly thought
To much politics.. and old IT-men.
I rather go back to making games and coding stuff then running a IT Cloud.
Imagine all the <Abbr explanation="Excel or powerpoint but for cloud infrastructure, where dreams go and die. Devops love this job security of formatted yaml files.">Kubernetes yaml</Abbr> files I would have to write to deploy this thing.

*RIP Docker compose in production.*

## Questions & Answers



*Questions about the article, answered by the developer.*



**1. You built an entire cloud infrastructure platform as a side project from game dev — at what point did you look at what you'd made and go "oh no, this is a real company if I let it be"?**

If you productify the things you do you get products. 
I like making products. 
I still think Tiderun is a good idea, its just that i am not that motivated to drive the hardware part myself.

**2. Why V8 over just embedding Lua or something lighter — especially since you later wrote about moving from Lua to V8 for other work too?**

For the javascript ofc!

**3. How do you actually get streaming SSE to feel like a first-class primitive instead of just... wrapping a callback around a request-response model?**

Well ofc you build the entire serverside implementation with streaming all the way through out the Rust TCP layers all the way back up!

**4. Isn't 'sovereign European cloud' kind of a fantasy when every V8 update, every npm package, and Deno itself all flow through US-controlled infrastructure?**

That question was generated by an US-controlled LLM. 
I think the software landscape itself is global, the infrastructure not so much (yet).

**5. Running many functions in the same V8 runtime container in parallel — what stops one bad function from poisoning the sandbox for everyone else?**

V8 isolation and sandboxes!

**6. Did anything from building Tiderun's architecture actually make it back into how you think about building games at Morgondag?**

In general I think all systemic cloud software, servers etc always inspires back or from game-design. 
The message system in Lunar Soil is a little FaaS API if you will. 


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*Canonical URL: https://morgondag.io/news/tiderun-streaming-faas*