Serverless vs. Containers: A 2026 Decision Framework

Serverless and containers solve overlapping problems. Both abstract away the work of managing operating systems. Both let teams deploy code without thinking about servers. Both scale on demand. The differences between them are the sort of thing that gets obscured in vendor marketing, where serverless is positioned as the future and containers as the past. The reality, at the point a team is making an architectural decision, is more pragmatic. This post is a decision framework for choosing betwee