Hanzo Functions: Serverless Compute with Zero Cold Starts

Cold starts are serverless computing's original sin. Your function sits idle, a request arrives, and the user waits 500ms to 3 seconds while the runtime boots. For commerce — where every millisecond of checkout latency costs revenue — this is unacceptable.

Today we are launching Hanzo Functions: serverless compute with zero cold starts.

How We Eliminated Cold Starts

The traditional serverless model: spin up a container per invocation, execute, tear down. The cold start is the container boot time.

Our approach: V8 isolates. Each function runs in a lightweight V8 isolate that starts in under 5 milliseconds. Isolates share the V8 engine but have completely isolated memory spaces. The security model is equivalent to containers; the startup time is three orders of magnitude faster.

Use Cases

Webhooks and Event Processing

Process incoming webhooks from payment providers, shipping carriers, and third-party services:

export default async function handler(event) {
  const { type, data } = event.body

  if (type === 'payment.completed') {
    await updateOrderStatus(data.orderId, 'paid')
    await sendConfirmationEmail(data.customerEmail)
    await notifyWarehouse(data.orderId)
  }

  return { status: 200 }
}

API Endpoints

Build custom API endpoints without managing servers:

• Custom pricing logic
• Inventory checks against external systems
• Personalization logic
• A/B test routing

Scheduled Jobs

Run recurring tasks on a schedule:

• Inventory sync with suppliers
• Report generation
• Data cleanup
• Cache warming

Runtime Support

• JavaScript/TypeScript: Full Node.js API compatibility
• Python: CPython runtime with pip packages
• Go: Compiled binary execution

Pricing

• Free tier: 100K invocations/month
• Standard: $0.20 per million invocations
• Compute time: $0.000016 per GB-second

No idle charges. No minimum commitments.

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Zach Kelling is the founder of Hanzo Industries (Techstars '17).