> There was not really anything in the article that should have lead you to believe that this was a "serverless only" issue, so I think the bashing against Netlify here is quite unwarranted.
It's not because you can use an external cache like Redis[1]. You can scale to hundreds of instances with an external redis cache and you'll be fine. The problem is that you can't operate on Netlify scale with a simple implementation like that. Netlify can't afford running a redis instance for every NextJS application without significantly cutting into their margins (not just from compute cost, but running and managing millions of redis instances at scale won't work).
Clearly Vercel has their own in-house cache service that they have priced in their model. Netlify could run a redis instance per application, though more realistically it needs its own implementation of a multi-tenant caching service that is secure, can scale, cost effective, and fits their operational model. They are not willing to invest in that.
[1] https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/examples/cache...