Serverless Computing in the Caribbean Context
Serverless computing promises to eliminate the need to manage servers, scale automatically with demand, and charge only for actual usage. For Caribbean businesses, these promises are attractive — especially the cost model, which allows startups to avoid the upfront expense of provisioning servers. However, the reality of serverless in the Caribbean comes with nuances that global tutorials rarely address.
The major serverless platforms — AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, and edge platforms like Vercel and Cloudflare Workers — do not have data centers in the Caribbean. The closest AWS region is us-east-1 in Northern Virginia, and the closest Cloudflare edge nodes are in Miami and San Juan. This means that every serverless function invocation involves a round trip to the continental United States, adding latency that can range from 40 to 120 milliseconds depending on the function.
When Serverless Makes Sense
For background tasks that do not require real-time response — processing uploaded images, sending transactional emails, generating reports, or handling webhook callbacks — the latency overhead is negligible. Serverless excels in these scenarios. API endpoints that power mobile apps can also work well, as the latency is amortized across the overall app loading experience and is rarely the bottleneck compared to network quality on the device side.
Edge Computing as a Middle Ground
Edge computing platforms like Cloudflare Workers and Vercel Edge Functions bring computation closer to the user by running code on CDN edge nodes. While there is no edge node in Jamaica, the Miami and San Juan nodes reduce latency compared to Virginia-based Lambda functions. For lightweight operations like authentication checks, URL redirects, A/B testing, or serving personalized content, edge functions offer a meaningful performance improvement for Caribbean visitors.
Cost Considerations for Jamaican Businesses
The pay-per-invocation model of serverless is genuinely beneficial for Caribbean businesses with variable traffic patterns. A Jamaican tourism website that sees heavy traffic from November through April and quiet periods in the off-season can save significantly compared to running a dedicated server year-round. AWS Lambda's free tier of one million requests per month is sufficient for many small business use cases, and even beyond the free tier, costs remain low for moderate traffic volumes.
Building a Serverless Architecture Locally
Jamaican development teams adopting serverless should invest in local development and testing tooling. The Serverless Framework, AWS SAM, and Vercel CLI all allow you to run serverless functions locally during development, which avoids the slow feedback loop of deploying to the cloud for every code change. Structure your functions to be stateless and idempotent, keep cold start times low by minimizing dependencies, and implement proper error handling and logging from the start.
