How Modal built ultra-low-latency serverless routing with Pingora, Envoy, and Spanner
Summary
Modal introduces "Servers" — a new ultra-low-latency primitive for running HTTP, WebSocket, and gRPC workloads on their serverless platform. The article provides a deep technical dive into how Modal built the routing layer for these Servers using Pingora (a Rust-based proxy framework by Cloudflare), Envoy, and Google Cloud Spanner. It covers the architectural decisions, trade-offs, and design patterns behind achieving sub-millisecond routing overhead for latency-sensitive applications like LLM inference for interactive agents.
Source
Twitter / XHow Modal built ultra-low-latency serverless routing with Pingora, Envoy, and Spannermodal.comKey quotes
· 3 pulledServers are designed for applications where every millisecond counts, like LLM inference for interactive agents.
Servers give you a regionalized, autoscaling pool of HTTP server replicas behind Modal's routing layer, with the deployment ergonomics, fast feedback loops, and autoscaling we consider table stakes (for humans and for agents).
Now, you can also run ultra-low-latency Servers on Modal for HTTP, WebSocket, and gRPC traffic.
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