Everyone Said 'Just Go Serverless.' I Ran a Long-Lived Node Process — Here's What That Bought

[ EXECUTIVE TEARDOWN // TL;DR ] A real-time product is defined by the connection that stays open, and the economics of serverless assume nothing stays open. In-process state turns per-message Redis round trips into memory reads, and fan-out into a loop rather than thousands of billable invocations. The honest cost: draining deploys, scaling...